Five Poughkeepsie High School students are trying to get the City of Poughkeepsie to compost.

“We have a lot of food waste,” said Alex Gonzalez, a senior. “If we can start eliminating the food waste it will help with the waste problem dramatically.”

Gonzalez, Leechin Lodge, Joshua Pinder, Nazirah Bagley and Yusef Mussallam, members of the No Child Left Inside program through the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Dutchess County, have been researching how some other surrounding municipalities have launched composting programs. This weekend, they will debut their suggestions for how the Queen City take part at the Sustainable Futures Summit, held at Vassar College.

The event at Vassar’s Villard Hall, which will be held from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday, April 22, will feature presentations, workshops, exhibitions and discussions relating to climate change and how to enact a greener future. 

Chris Bowser, the Education Coordinator for the Department of Environmental Conservation’s Hudson River Estuary Program and the Hudson River Research Reserve, is the keynote speaker. Other college and high school students are also taking part to present projects and ideas.

“They’ll get a chance to share with schools from, not just Dutchess County, there’s schools from throughout the Hudson Valley attending,” said No Child Left Inside Coordinator Anna Harrod-McGrew. “Just this exposure to different ideas gets the wheels turning and gets them excited to learn more.”

No Child Left Inside has existed for roughly 15 years at Cornell Cooperative. The program hires six students ages 14-19 each year and trains them to become youth environmental educators, who work with peers and younger youth, at after-school, summer camp and other programs and events, to encourage them to get outdoors.

Each year they have a community environment improvement project as a driving focus, in addition to smaller projects. In past years that’s included creating community gardens, proposing a bike share system for the City of Poughkeepsie and during the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic started a podcast on greenspaces.

This year the team has been taking part in an eel-counting effort on the Fall Kill Creek and researching compost. They spoke to a master gardener from Cornell Cooperative, worked with Christine Pizer’s environmental class in the high school as she had a composting unit, and did independent research that included looking into the programs in the cities of Beacon and Kingston.

“We’re taking inspiration from research we found and what we found from those composting programs,” Gonzalez said. “We’re making our own version of what we think would work for Poughkeepsie.”

What they’re pitching on a tri-fold presentation at the Vassar summit is setting up six or seven locations around the city where residents can bring their food waste. A composting company would then pick it up and recycle it into useful dirt, rather than the waste be burned in an incinerator or taken to a landfill.

“We’re going to leave the bins open so it’s public and easy to access,” Gonzalez said, noting Kingston locks its drop-off locations. “I feel like that’s how to get people involved, if we make it easy to access.”

Should the program advance, Gonzalez said it would not be the first time No Child Left Inside impacted a city program. He said previously a trash assessment they conducted on the Fall Kill was presented to the city, which helped lead to city residents receiving larger garbage cans.

“That makes me proud, that I had some hand in helping with that,” he said. “I enjoy making an impact on my community.” 

Most of the six No Child Left Inside Youth Environmental Educators are graduating seniors, creating openings in the program. For more information, visit the program’s website.