When compost is more than food waste - nurturing land, people and community

Bailey Peryman, Ōtautahi-based environmental champion and Kaiwhakatere/Project Manager for Nōku Te Ao, has worked tirelessly to support the soil health and food systems of Aotearoa for the last 15 years. With strategic, infrastructure and administrative support from Seed the Change | He Kākano Hāpai, the early-stage 20:20 Compost initiative he co-founded in 2020 has evolved into the extensive mahinga kai programme Kō Mahi Ko Ora, currently being delivered in collaboration with 21st-century pā wānaga (learning village) Te Pā o Rākaihautū.

“A bunch of things collided for me around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic that inspired me to focus more closely on compost and localised food systems,” Bailey says. “I was able to carry my love of youth work, community development, and social enterprise into a new initiative and context with 20:20 Compost.”

Bailey was being mentored at the time by Huia Lambie (Ngāti Mutunga /Te Ātiawa), who introduced him to 20:20 Compost collaborators Erin Crampton and Gavin Sole. “Originally, the four of us wanted to create an organic waste compost system that was scaleable in the sense of being able to be replicated lots of times by lots of different communities, and we created a model and methodology to test that,”  he says. 

The early days of 20:20 Compost.

Photo credit: Claire Newman

“The startup and tech ecosystem in Christchurch does a great job of being fast - 48-hour contests and 12-week incubators - but nurturing something like 20:20 that is targeting systems change, that’s not a 12-week process. At its fastest, it’s seven years. More realistically, it can only really succeed through intergenerational life cycles. Seed the Change understood that, and they’ve supported us with a quiet confidence in ways that no one else could.”

Through their high-trust partnership, Seed the Change was able to assist 20:20 Compost in seeking funding and delivering day-to-day operations during its founding stage. “They took on the invoicing, payments and core administrative work for us, removing a significant burden and enabling us to focus on the kaupapa (plan, purpose), which they gave us space to do,” Bailey says. “Our relationship with them was built on a bedrock of trust that reassured us we were on the right track, even though we were operating in an uncertain innovation environment.” 

“We had access to grant funding, but no organisational structure to apply from,” Erin says, “and no bank account to put funds in. Rather than risk the time, effort and money of setting up the wrong structure, we were thrilled to work with Seed the Change, which allowed us to delay structure decisions.” “It was amazing to have an umbrella organisation behind us,” Huia adds. “What it did was release us from administrative and infrastructure tasks, enabling the four of us to focus exclusively on the project.”

Composting piles - at pace of nature

Photo credit: Bailey Peryman

A close relationship with Te Pā has enabled Kō Mahi Ko Ora to focus more explicitly on the intergenerational imperative of the work they’re doing, Bailey says. “Te Pā is modelled in the image of Rākaihautū, an explorer, scientist and astronomer who lit the fires of occupation in Te Waipounamu and, with his kō (digging tool), carved out lakes throughout the island. A thousand years later, Kō Mahi Ko Ora takes inspiration from Rākaihautū in working with tamariki (children) at Te Pā, where the village raises the child. In this 21st-century context, we are able to work with tamariki as young as babies in the early childhood centre right through to kaumatua (elders). Some of the tamariki have parents or grandparents teaching or performing other roles within the kura (school), and some of those kaumatua are working now to make compost, build soil, grow food, and cycle that back through into the kitchen, then out again through the compost.”

Conceptually, Bailey says, the objective is for the project itself to work in much the same way as the land it is supporting. “I am doing a lot of work around this currently in my doctoral thesis, focusing on how the project is germinating and coming to life in Te Ao Māori, a different kind of substrate from where it started. It requires the same kind of work connecting socially and culturally into communities as we are doing with soil, and its growth will be dictated by the quality of relationships we build. I can see so many pathways now into other communities that will allow Kō Mahi Ko Ora to maintain the original core intent of replication. It just needed more care and more time. It will scale, but in a non-linear way.” Erin says, “My hope is that 20:20 Compost will continue to iterate, becoming what the community needs.  Because it can become whatever the community needs it to be.”

Photo Credit: Zayed Sustainability Prize

The early days of the pandemic exacerbated existing issues around food insecurity, Huia reflects, creating a renewed urgency for better systems and education around growing food. “People have forgotten when and how to plant; we noticed people going out and buying seeds for plants that would never grow at that time of year, and it highlighted this incredible loss of knowledge. Compost, while obviously creating better conditions to feed plants and make them more nutritious, is also about reconnecting with the whenua (land). This shaped the aim for 20:20 Compost: to garden people and land and feed people and land.”

At that time, Erin had just finished launching a regenerative farming education programme in Canada and was in New Zealand wondering what was next for her. “I caught up with Bailey and met Gavin for the first time; the absolute passion that they both had for compost was infectious. Having just exited two real-world, hands-on businesses in Canada, I helped work through the business model options with the team. There were many different options and opportunities; this little project could provide so many unique positive outcomes. We drafted business models to help us all think through the different options of what was possible, guided by community energy and how we wanted to participate.”

It was in these early stages that the team connected with Seed the Change | He Kākano Hāpai for infrastructure and strategic support. “It’s a very humble role that Seed the Change plays,” Bailey says, “while also being very sophisticated. Anake [Goodall, Seed the Change Chair] delivers immense strategic value in every sentence. He is uniquely able to walk between Te Ao Māori, enterprise and sustainability worlds.

The compost that would enrich soils.

Photo credit: Bailey Peryman

The 20:20 Compost team started to imagine what a scaleable community composting system might look like in Te Ao Māori. “With guidance from Huia, we prioritised working with Māori communities who are most affected by food insecurity,” Bailey says. “Refocusing our efforts with a Te Ao Māori lens gave us different capacities, readiness and priorities and provided all these different strengths that surpassed my original expectations around the kaupapa. She connected us to Te Pā o Rākaihautū, an intergenerational learning and teaching facility, and the relationships and shared purpose we found there really started to change a lot of my thinking.” “I was inspired by Parihaka,” Huia says, “and the idea of Māori reactivating their place on ancestral land. When the project started, my vision for composting at Te Pā was to be part of a project to enable tangata whenua to reconnect and restore their land, as well as increase food resilience."

“Te Pā had an existing food cycle where they were already doing all the right things, but they weren’t quite linking up and flowing,” Bailey says. “I began spending more time there composting each week with the kids during school time. We quickly got their organics cycle functioning quite well, and before long we were producing amazing food. The garden was growing; we were pulling resources in. This natural flow started taking hold. While we could’ve just pressed ahead with that scaleable model we started 20:20 with, we weren’t convinced that it would get to the people who would most benefit from it.” "The project weaved its way through a variety of iterations,” Erin says, “wondering how it wanted to be, and where it wanted to live. Like all living things, projects need a home and a community that cares for them. This one found its home at Te Pā.”  

20:20 Compost has since evolved into Kō Mahi Ko Ora, loosely translated as “work is sustenance.” Kō Mahi Ko Ora is one of what Bailey refers to as a constellation of initiatives that sit underneath the umbrella of Nōku Te Ao. Outgrowing the need for early seed support from Seed the Change, Nōku Te Ao emerged as a perfect fit to support the initiative as the work deepens and matures. “Nōku Te Ao is the main charitable trust which, in a day-to-day function, sits alongside Te Pā and can do wraparound growth and whānau ora activities.”

Planting at Te Pā, Photo Credit: Alden Williams, The Press

Now that Kō Mahi Ko Ora has found its feet at Te Pā, the team has big aspirations for the road ahead, Bailey says. “We’re active across four sites and capable of handling 1,000 tonnes of compost per annum. We’re looking to grow that number to 5,000 over the next few years, with an aim to be able to feed 1,000 people a day through Te Pā. We’re looking at funding opportunities to support this, one of which is the Zayed Sustainability Prize, where we were recently selected as one of 33 finalists from a global pool of nearly 6,000 submissions. My brother Ollie, who is now in a leading role with Kō Mahi Ko Ora, framed that submission as an opportunity to support “indigenous biocultural technology” or Te Puku Māra (digestive gardening). Whether we win that funding or find another source, whether we grow slower or grow faster, we’ll always be working towards that first stretch objective of feeding 1,000 people a day.”  “Whatever happens next, I think the project is already doing what I envisaged when it started,” Huia reflects. “That land has been reactivated; in such a short time, we have already touched so many whānau.”

Although the transition from Seed the Change to Nōku Te Ao is now complete, Bailey sees Seed the Change continuing to play a role as Kō Mahi Ko Ora grows, though he’s open to exactly what form that might take. “They provide security that there’s an entity to support us in both critical and mundane ways. It’s an essential function like an organ in the human body; it may not have to work quite as hard right now, but it is still an integral part of the kaupapa. We are in a place in our journey where we want to bed in and go deeper to grow the types of futures we’re connected to when we work through whakapapa (lineage, history) and that responsibility of being kaitiaki (caretakers). I’m in an incredibly fortunate position to bring a needed skillset to this mahi (work) and to have a curiosity and a natural motivation to work with the living world. I’ve never seen it so well supported as I’ve seen it in this constellation that includes Seed the Change.”

To learn more, visit www.rakaihautu.com, or contact Bailey at: bailey.peryman@nokuteao.maori.nz.