Food Cycle Collective
Food Cycle Collective is a collaborative initiative rooted in Pomona that centers composting, bikes, food, and community-building. We come together as a collective to care for the earth and the people on it. We move in ways that value relationships, support empowerment, promote positive transformation, and increase health for individuals, communities, and environments.
We are helpful, creative, caring, courageous, compassionate, consistent & dependable, responsive, patient, and willing to work for meaningful change. We recognize and acknowledge our interdependence and that many issues affecting us are integrated. We strive to grow our capacity and engage our creativity to meet the needs around us with constructive sustained action rather than ignoring, denying, or lashing out at people or problems.
Our Story
The vision of Food Cycle Collective is to be part of a community that lives for sustainability, that embodies care, and meets the needs of self, each other, and the earth. We want to help decentralize the food and waste systems and bring them back to the community level. We want a world where power is not connected to structural position or systemic privilege, but rather a world where we recognize the power inherent in all people. We want a world where people are motivated to help one another for the purposes of being in community with each other, and not because of financial incentives or to improve their image. We want to keep food, water, transportation, safety and security accessible to everyone by working to grow and sustain our community through nonviolence. We envision a future with healthy soil, healthy food, health people, healthy communities, and a healthy world.
Since we began in the spring of 2020, we have carried out weekly food scrap collections in partnership with a number of Pomona-based initiatives and community members such as with farmers markets, food pantries, restaurants, cafes, grocery stores, and neighbors. We have also conducted a group ride through the community every Sunday since the summer of 2020, where we compost food scraps at local gardens as well as distribute prepared food and other needed supplies to people currently living in the streets. We currently partner with 5 local community gardens provisioning them with the compost needed to sustain their growing operations and regularly engage with over 100 community members on a weekly basis during our community food scrap drop-off and pick up activities, community composting programing, food rescue, preparation, & distribution work, and street outreach efforts.