We aimed to facilitate cooperation between three European environmental grassroots initiatives for the deepening of exchange and mutual support on the practice of community composting. By sharing approaches, experiences and good practices we aimed at improving conditions for on-site composting on a neighbourhood level in the cities Berlin, Prague and Vienna. We wanted to explore the necessary conditions to set up sustainable community composting sites in local municipal spaces, prospect different types of community composting and identify suitable locations including logistical, demographic and environmental characteristics. We intended to develop a transnational network and make the organisations key-actors in community composting education; to create learning spaces and provide both on-site and on-line training material on community composting. In cooperation with the associated partners we planned reach out to adult citizens with different backgrounds in age, gender, social status and adults with fewer learning opportunities and multipliers in the educational sector; to produce comprehensive learning materials for all people who want to start their own composting projects or need support in running their ongoing projects.
The needs and goals for the staff of the participating organisations were to exchange experiences, ideas and build-up know-how on community composting. We aimed to draw inspiration from each other’s experience and to explore the existing solutions to guarantee successful implementation of community composting. The cooperation should lead to knowledge gain on strategic planning for future work together with municipalities and associated partners. We also wanted to plan and set next steps to upscale the existing infrastructure. We planned to share the knowledge gathered with people who were interested in community composting, wanted to start their own community composting group or work in adult education and wanted to use community composting as a tool for environmental education as there is a lack of know-how and skills in implementing such facilities as well as in proper composting techniques. In existing community composting groups in some of the partner countries diversity was low. Therefore, the integration of strategies to reach different target groups were supposed to help to tackle this challenge.