The
Egino Emerging vermiculture Social Enterprise
It sounds like simple concept: economically and socially excluded volunteers convert waste into fertilizer. The fertilizer is then sold to raise funds to expand the project. As the project expands, more waste is converted to fertilizer, more excluded people are included, the more locally produced fertilizer is used to enrich our depleted soil. It’s an upward spiral of inclusion, regenerative agriculture, and social responsibility.
But it’s easier said than done.
We're not afraid of hard work. In fact, Egino Emerging is building on our past success. For the last few years, we’ve been cultivating two formerly disused gardens where excluded people grow food to donate to food banks. Despite the headwinds of bureaucracy, lack of funds, storm damage and pandemics, we’ve rescued and developed the gardens through make-do-and-mend innovation. Our unemployed volunteers have even dipped into their meagre funds to purchase seeds and tools. A truly inspiring work ethic from all involved.
We’re ready to take it to the next level. We want to do more than just grow food for food banks. We want to create fertilizer for our community. We want to create jobs for excluded people. We want to expand this project so others can benefit. And we want to do it all via worm composting.
Using our roots in guerrilla gardening, we’ve converted disused beds into a continuous flow wormery and are in the process of converting a disused 1100 litre wheelie bin into a second continuous flow wormery. We’ve identified a large amount of waste which we use to feed our worms. We’ve consulted with experts and continue to learn a great deal. It’s time to put our plans into motion.
We need to buy some composting worms and few bits of equipment to start our first composting wormery. While this is growing, we’ll build our second wormery at the first site. Then, we need to build our third wormery at our other garden. Within six months, we hope to start producing high-grade liquid plant food to sell to fund our project.
While our make-do-and-mend ethos has served us well to get us this far, we need some funds to get us going. The good news is, once we get going, we’ll be on our way to self-sufficiency and expansion. We’re looking for funding from grant providers and crowdfunding. If you’d like to contribute, please contact us.
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We’ll keep you posted on progress.
