Welcome New Board Members
The Kompost Kids organization is lucky and grateful to be welcoming two excellent and accomplished board members to our leadership team. Both will leverage their academic backgrounds, professional expertise, and personal commitment to our tireless cause of organics diversion, local disposal, and community education in Milwaukee and beyond.
Renee Scampini is a Milwaukee native and current UW-Milwaukee Urban Studies Ph.D. student with a background in nutrition. Having lived in Boston for several years, she was inspired by the vast potential for growing healthy food in urban spaces and earned her Master Urban Gardener status through the Boston Natural Areas Network. Scampini lives and composts in River West and nurtures a passion – some may call it an obsession – for minimizing waste in all ways possible. From reusing her grandma’s printed and catalogued family emails as scrap paper to picking recyclables out of my office trash (she can’t help it), Scampini is constantly finding new ways to use items to their maximum potential. Up to her elbows sorting compost at the Bayview Bash, Renee determined it was a ton of fun and hopes to see Kompost Kids events evolve into educational community tools for maximizing growing soil through compost and minimizing buried waste in a landfill.
Harini Aiyer is an irrepressible data hound. Having put in 10,000 hours of practice analyzing biomedical data during her Ph.D. and postdoctoral training, she now applies the same skills to new areas of interest, among which presently is to find out what it is that keeps some people from composting all their organic wastes all the time. Aiyer carefully designed and implemented the Kompost Kids residential composting survey, analyzed the Phase 1 data, and is currently distilling important insights into composting behaviors in the Milwaukee area, barriers to source separation, and use of Kompost Kids community composting sites. We hope this data, and the follow-up survey will shed light on how we can improve education, outreach, and policies regarding composting in Milwaukee.
Welcome, Renee and Harini! If you or someone you know would like to join our mission at any level, contact us or fill out a volunteer application online.