JANUARY #2026

Hello,

In the last month alone, we composted 2,981.77 pounds of food material on site at UFO Palm Springs.

No hauling.
No export out of the city.
No pilot language.

This is what community composting looks like when it is treated as infrastructure, not education.

With community composting as the centerpiece, we are establishing UFO Palm Springs, the Urban Farm of Palm Springs.

This site exists to show how community-based solutions can achieve more than climate action alone. It is about building systems that deliver multiple public benefits at the same time: waste reduction, soil health, water conservation, workforce training, and local capacity.

UFO Palm Springs is an active, evolving site. We are documenting what works, what fails, and what can be learned in real time.

This work does not happen overnight. It requires site control, staff coordination, and consistent operations. Early weeks involve setup, troubleshooting, and learning before results stabilize.

In January,Palm Springs city arborists West Coast Arborists delivered more than four tons of mulch to our site and another two tons by a local tree trimmer.

That material is now being used to establish:

Local organic material stayed local and was turned into community assets.

Handling this volume required equipment access, storage space, and labor planning. Without those pieces in place, material flow becomes a bottleneck rather than a benefit.

In December, we completed two water conservation projects.

This project took three years to make possible. Finding someone willing to come to the desert and teach hands-on water reuse was not easy. When the opportunity came, we acted.

As a result, 11 local people were trained

We are no longer just talking about water conservation. We are practicing it, documenting it, and teaching it through real projects.

Thank you Desert Water Agency of Palm Springs for supporting the project with conservation resources and swag for participants.

Infrastructure alone does not reduce contamination. People do.

In December and January, we delivered three community education events through a partnership with Jewish Family Services of the Desert. The events were held in:

Across these sessions, we educated nearly 100 community members on:

Education reduces contamination over time, not immediately. Behavior change requires repeated touchpoints and reinforcement.

Recently, an almost 80-year-old gardener visited our site while work was still in progress. She stopped at a raised bed and pointed to cilantro that had gone to flower. She told us she had used cilantro in her cooking almost every other day for most of her life, but she had never seen cilantro flower before. That moment mattered. It showed how much distance has grown between people, food, and soil.

Many communities treat organics diversion as a messaging problem. Our experience shows it is an operations problem, a training problem, and a systems design problem. When composting, water reuse, education, and lived experience are designed together, the outcomes are more durable and more useful to the community.

All of the work described here is supported by a grant we received from the Thrive Catalyst Fund, administered by the Inland Empire Labor Institute.