PP&C Completes Thrive Catalyst Fund
PP&C successfully completed the Thrive Catalyst Fund program. We installed the infrastructure we promised.
Our next phase is already underway. We are focused on:
Community education
Growing food
Keeping jobs going through community-scale composting and urban farming
Thank you to Thrive Inland SoCal for believing in us and giving us this opportunity.
There is a state grant program that will fund community-scale composting infrastructure, pay the people who operate it, and require workforce development as a condition of the award.
It is not a solid waste program. Most SB 1383 coordinators never see it.
It is the Transformative Climate Communities Program, and Round 6 is open now.
If your agency has a grants coordinator or a planning department, this is the issue to forward. The person who writes the application is usually not the person who tracks the diversion numbers.
What the program is
TCC was established by AB 2722 (Burke, 2016).
It is administered by the California Strategic Growth Council and implemented by the Department of Conservation.
Since 2018, SGC has awarded more than $424 million in TCC grants to 37 of California's most disadvantaged communities.
Round 6 is funded by the Safe Drinking Water, Wildfire Prevention, Drought Preparedness, and Clean Air Bond Act of 2024, commonly called the Climate Bond.
Approximately $98.4 million is available across three grant types in Round 6.
TCC Is Place-Based. Here Is Where Composting Fits.
TCC is place-based. It funds a coordinated set of projects inside a single defined neighborhood, not a single standalone project spread across a jurisdiction. The project area must qualify as a disadvantaged community. SGC provides a free TCC Mapping Tool to identify an eligible project area and generate the required map.
If you are applying for TCC, think about urban greening and GHG reduction through the lens of community-scale composting and urban farming. Composting and food production are one way to build the coordinated, place-based project TCC is designed to fund. They are not the only way, but they are a strategy worth putting on the table alongside the more familiar tree canopy and green infrastructure approaches.
For community partners in your project area, see the California Alliance for Community Composting: thecacc.org
What Is Still Open, and What Is Not
If you have heard a TCC deadline has already passed, that was one specific gate, not the whole program.
The Implementation Grant required a pre-proposal, and that pre-proposal was due June 30, 2026. The Implementation Grant is the largest type, up to $27.5 million over a six-year term. If your agency did not file a pre-proposal by June 30, that grant is not available to you in this round.
The free Application Technical Assistance request form closed July 31, 2026. If your agency missed it, that resource is no longer available for this round.
Two grant types are still fully open. Neither requires a pre-proposal.
Planning Grant: up to $300,000, two-year term. Due September 30, 2026. This is the realistic entry point for an agency acting now. Partnership development, community needs assessments, feasibility studies, and community engagement design are all eligible activities. In other words, the grant funds the groundwork itself. Not yet knowing your local composting partners does not disqualify you. It is a fundable task.
Project Development Grant: up to $5 million, two-year term. Also due September 30, 2026. This grant funds pre-development on a project that already has some definition, including feasibility, environmental assessment, and operations and maintenance planning. It is open, but it favors agencies that already have a defined project. A first-time applicant starting from zero will find the Planning Grant the better fit.
With both remaining deadlines on September 30, agencies have roughly eight weeks from this issue's send date to act.
SGC holds drop-in application office hours every other Tuesday at 2 PM Pacific. The next dates are August 11, August 25, and September 8. September 8 is the last office hours session before the September 30 deadline.
Where Composting Sits in the Guidelines
Composting is not a workaround inside TCC. It is a named strategy.
The Round 6 Final Guidelines include Strategy 6: Recycling, Composting, and Waste Reduction, and Strategy 7: Urban Greening and Green Infrastructure.
That distinction is worth holding onto. A community composting site with a food forest, a distribution point, and a paid crew touches both strategies at once. TCC rewards exactly that kind of stacking, because the program is built to fund coordinated projects rather than isolated ones.
Who Can Apply, and How the Partnership Works
A Lead Applicant must be based in California and must be one of the following: a California Native American Tribe, a Tribally-owned nonprofit, a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit organization, a public agency, a local agency, a special district, a joint powers authority, or a public utility.
This is the structural opening.
A city can lead and bring a community composter or nonprofit in as a partner. A nonprofit can lead and bring the city in as a partner. Both are eligible on their own terms.
The practical division of labor tends to look like this:
The city or district brings land control, permitting authority, SB 1383 program data, and the ability to sign a long-term site agreement.
The community composter or nonprofit brings operational track record, resident trust, existing throughput data, and a workforce already doing the work.
Neither one carries a competitive application alone. A city without community roots struggles on engagement scoring. A small nonprofit without site control struggles on readiness. If your agency cannot name a local operator, that is a solvable problem. See the section below.
Implementation Grant activities must be carried out alongside required and funded community engagement, workforce development, and displacement avoidance activities. Those are not add-ons. They are conditions.
If You Do Not Know Who Your Community Composters Are
This is the most common gap we hear about. A jurisdiction is interested in the partnership structure and cannot name a single local operator to call.
They usually exist. They are simply not in the hauler database, not on the franchise agreement, and not at the solid waste table.
Start with the California Alliance for Community Composting.
CACC maintains a statewide site directory at thecacc.org/locations. The map covers Community Composting for Green Spaces compost hubs, which were funded by CalRecycle through California Climate Investments.
CACC also publishes its steering committee participants with direct links. The list spans a wide range of operating models. Some are nonprofit hubs on borrowed land. Some are fee-based service providers hauling commercial food scraps. Some are programs run inside a community services district.
One participant, the Isla Vista Compost Collective, operates as a program inside the Isla Vista Community Services District. That is a public agency running a community composting program directly. If you are weighing whether this model can live inside a public entity, that is your proof that it already does.
CACC organizes regional chapters covering the Northern Region, Central Sierras, Sacramento Valley, San Francisco Bay Area, San Joaquin Valley, Inland Empire, San Diego, and Los Angeles.
CalRecycle points to CACC directly from its own community-scale composting page. This is not an outside referral. It is the pathway your regulator already publishes.
Two honest limits on the directory:
The map shows CCGS-funded hubs. It is not a complete registry of every community composter in California. Plenty of operators are not on it.
Several regional chapter pages are still being built out. Use the site map and the participant list as your starting point, then call.
For a TCC application, what you are looking for is not a name on a map. You are looking for an operator who can document throughput, has a working relationship with residents in the proposed project area, and can survive a two-year grant term. Make the calls now. Partnership development is itself an eligible Planning Grant activity, which means the grant can fund the work of finding and formalizing the partner you do not yet have.