COMMUNITY FUNDED COMPOST TRUCK

We’re growing. You’ve watched us develop from a one person operation to a five person team. In just over two years, we’ve gone from using one truck, to one truck and a bike, to a truck and three vehicles. We started with routes in Fort Wayne’s ‘05 and ‘07 and now cover four counties: Allen, Huntington, Wabash, and Whitley. We’re driving hundreds of miles per week to pick up your food scraps and yard waste and we’ve got big plans for the future—a future you’re helping to create by being a part of the Dirt Wain community. 

We are asking for you to invest in our shared future by contributing to our goal of purchasing the first (that we know of) community-funded compost truck in the country. We’re a small team and the work of gathering food scraps is strenuous. Having a compost truck means that we will be able to pick up increased amounts of food scraps while keeping our prices low and service accessible. 

The truck will be converted into a moving, living monument to our community. We want to recognize you by having your name painted on the side of the truck. We think of the truck as a community asset, and this is one way we will celebrate each time we pick up compost. 

(Y)our Community

Dirt Wain as a business has community building as its founding principle. We believe in helping our community become healthier by cutting carbon and methane emissions, and fighting climate breakdown. We work to make composting easy and accessible to folks at all income levels. 

Our Compost It Forward initiative provides funds for people to compost who cannot easily afford it. We run a community garden and small native prairie as a place to learn about everything from gardening to composting and restoring the health of the soil and land in our region. We believe that this truck will be a benefit not just to us, but to the community we serve.

(Y)our Dream Ride 

The funds we raise will be used to purchase a used garbage truck. The truck will be repurposed for collecting compostable materials. The truck can lift large bins, which can weigh between 300 and 400 pounds. After gathering a day’s worth of materials, the truck can dump them at our compost site. This will take a lot of strain off the bodies of our composters. We have needed this truck for several months. The sooner we can use this tool, the faster we get to building other composting infrastructure—there is an enormous amount to do!

The support you give to this effort will mean so much to us beyond having a piece of equipment to sustain our work. It will help in the challenging task of  building capacity for getting every last food scrap in our region composted and shifting attitudes about food waste where we live. This is important to everyone’s health and the livability of NE Indiana in the coming decades as we see massive ecological changes in our region and planet. 

We already have a tremendous amount of gratitude for the support we have received from the NE Indiana community of people concerned with composting and healing our region. We will continue to express our gratitude for your support of the campaign by finding more ways to give back and building fun, relevant, inclusive culture around composting and closing ecological loops.

Why Raise Money This Way?

You might be wondering why we’re raising funds in this way. The simple answer is that we believe in our community. We know we’re not a start-up – we’ve started, and we want to keep going, and we need your help to continue the momentum. This funding will allow us to focus on providing good service, making composting accessible, and building a movement and compost culture instead of worrying about taking on business loan debt. 

Business loans can sink a new business faster than anything else and we see them as too great a risk to what we are trying to build. Government grants are not available to small businesses for ecological work like ours. What we do is provide a community service that should be available to everyone, especially folks who do not have extra income to pay for composting. These are the big reasons we need your support