OUR WORK

Let It Rot Youth Program

Transforming disconnected youth into engaged ecological stewards.

What is Let It Rot?

We collaborate with Farm to School BC, Flourish School Food Society, and the Greater Victoria School District 61 to deliver “Let It Rot,” a semester-long experiential learning program and garden work experience for high-school aged students. The desired outcome is to transform disconnected youth into engaged stewards of our world. Our approach is to connect students first to local natural processes like soil food webs and decomposition and then secondly to big ideas like climate change. Furthermore, we encourage students and educators to view our communities as interconnected with each other and with nature. This is part of a forward-looking relational model, which inspires scientific inquiry while working to uphold responsibilities to Indigenous Peoples and to the land. By strengthening connections between individual youth and nature, we are creating future leaders who care about cultivating resilient communities.

Program History

The Compost Education Centre has provided Let It Rot programming at SJ Burnside Education Centre since 2022. SJ Burnside Education Center, located in the Greater Victoria School District, is an alternative school that offers a supportive and flexible learning environment to students in grades 9-12. In 2023, the Compost Education Centre started providing programming at Mount Douglas Secondary. At both schools, the Compost Education Centre engages with students as part of an environmental science class over the course of a semester. The Child and Youth Education Manager, Elora Adamson, facilitates weekly lectures and skill-building sessions. Through this longer-term engagement, multiple cohorts of high school-aged students have learned how to:

Build and steward a variety compost systems;
Examine soil and compost under the microscope
Transform lawns in thriving native plant gardens;
Grow food from seed to harvest to seed again!;
Design and maintain urban gardens
Create habitat for native pollinators;
Identify plants and fungus

Get in touch if you are interested in setting up Let It Rot programming for your high school-aged students.