Creating opportunities for adult education and social employment through sustainable organic waste management.
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Instructions (How to Use this Toolkit) Print E-mail

Introduction

The ‘Growing with Compost’ project was created to train adults to develop social economy composting projects in their local communities across Europe. The principal objectives are:
  • To provide the training and educational resources to encourage adults to actively participate in the process of sustainable organic waste management by composting.
  • To support adults learners in the increased development of social economy composting initiatives that will help meet local, national and European organic waste management targets.
  • To provide adult learners with the tools to create active communities, enliven urban and rural regions and to create new jobs for socially excluded people and the long term unemployed.
  • To increase partnership working between organisations promoting social economy composting at a European level.
In order to achieve these objectives, the project partners worked together to develop a toolkit of training resources. The use of these resources, both by the project partners and other interested groups, this will lead to the realisation of the objectives that are more focused on local benefits, because the focus of their use will be to precipitate the establishment of local community schemes and the benefits they provide.

The Toolkit Contents

The website (www.growingwithcompost.org) contains a massive information library of training materials on different topics pertinent to community composting. These have been sub-divided into three principle categories, home composting, garden waste composting and food waste composting. The range of materials available starts with the main legislation and policy drivers covering the different activities through to the practicalities of operating that kind of project, what resources are required, health and safety, complimentary activities and monitoring and evaluation. Some topics, such as working with adults with learning difficulties, overlap across the three main categories.

The range of topics available can be seen on the contents list for each category. Use this to decide what is relevant to your situation. Consider issues such what waste types are produced in your locality, what problems related to social disadvantage need addressing in your community and what types of housing and or businesses are you likely to work with. This will help you choose what toolkit item you need to read. Some topics such as legislation, business planning and fundraising will need to be considered by everyone no matter what their situation.

In the majority of cases each topic has at least a written technical information sheet and a PowerPoint presentation. The later comes with comprehensive notes so that people can use the slides to deliver a presentation on that topic for people interested in developing a community composting scheme. For some topics there are additional handouts containing further resources, sometimes sources of additional help and support, sometimes practical tools such as a spreadsheet which enables you to calculate how big a site you need or a sample HACCP plan for food waste composting sites.

Demonstration Sites

To compliment this technical information the project has revived an old CCN project and re-launched it as a European wide network of sites showing the scale and diversity of the sector and demonstrating best practice in the delivery of community composting. For the Continental European partners this has involved establishing sites from scratch, while in the UK we have appointed some of the best examples of existing community composting schemes.

The demonstrations sites fulfil a number of key functions within the project. The main one is that trainees can visit and learn from practical projects; they can see and feel how things are done rather than trying to imagine things after reading some dry text.

This allows for the development of training events that contain just the right combination of actual first hand experience and technical information. The sites provide an ideal venue for events or at least, if a meeting room is chosen that is close to the site, an excursion out of the class room.

Individuals or projects can contact demonstration sites to arrange for individual site visits. A demonstration site may however wish to seek recompense for their time and expenses in hosting a site visit, and visitors should be prepared for this. It is often possible to include visits to other projects in grant applications.

Running a Training Event Using the Toolkit

The toolkit has been designed so that it functions both as a source of technical information for people wishing to set up projects that will benefit their community and as a resource for people who want to develop training programmes. If you want to set up a training programme then the toolkit contains a wide range of presentation seminars with supporting materials such as information sheets and handouts that the trainees can take away with them. These can be used in any combination depending on the interests of your target audience.

There are a number of things you need to think about in order to run a training event:

  • Target Audience

    Who are you aiming your event at and why will they want to attend. It is essential that you develop an interesting programme that meets the needs of your target audience.

  • Programme

    It is that you pull together a lively and interesting programme for the target audience. If possible use several different people to deliver the sessions as this will keep it more interesting for the audience. It is also worth ensuring the event includes a mixture of both theoretical and practical activities. This may be a tour of demonstration site or a ‘hands on’ activity like building some composting bays.

    Also make sure there are several breaks during the day so that trainees get the chance to talk to each other. Networking is an extremely important part of these kinds of events and the trainees will be able to offer each other support and advice during and after the event.

    See the three example event programmes for ideas of how to structure an event.

  • Venue, equipment and logistics

    For an event to be successful it is essential that a comfortable venue is chosen. Ideally this will at or close to a demonstration site so that the event can include a combination of practical and theoretical sessions.

    Depending on your choice of venue you will need to consider what catering you need to provide for the delegates at the event and also what presentational equipment you may need to arrange separately such as PowerPoint facilities, flip charts, slide projectors and transport.

  • Budget

    There is no such thing as a free lunch, and your event will cost something to put on, no matter how cheap you try and make it. You need to ensure that you either have funding to pay for an event you are hosting or that you are charging a delegate fee that covers your costs. Don’t cut this budget so fine that you have to have a maximum delegate numbers to cover your costs.

    While you may wish to host a free event, it may be the case that delegates actually value something more if they have paid for it, even if that is only a small amount of money. You could ask for a deposit against costs that is repaid if people come but not if they cancel or don’t show.

  • Publicity

    If you do not publicise your event, how will anyone know you are putting it on? This is fairly obvious yet lots of events often go unpublicised. Exactly how you promote your event will depend on how wide an audience you want, and what medium you should use. This may be newsletters, posters, the internet, email distribution lists or something else.

    Publicity for an event will also promote your organisation and raise your profile as an active body.

  • Evaluation

    It is important that you get feedback on the event from the trainees. If you do not do this you will not know what people really thought about the event. This means you will not be able to improve your future events and make them more interesting for your delegates.

    See the sample evaluation form which you can adapt for your event.

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