Yes in My Backyard – YIMBY – Growing community, soil and resilience on Dja Dja Wurrung country.

Yes in My Backyard (YIMBY) is a scaleable trial of community compost hubs, linking people keen to compost, with those who aren’t, in neighbourhood clusters. The project will support neighbourhood resilience and reduce the amount of organics reaching landfill.

Goals

• Reduce carbon emissions of organics in landfill

• Share resources and resourcefulness

• Connect people in community - build community resilience

• Contribute to local food production through improving our soils

YIMBY FUTURE VISION

YIMBY is the preferred option of most households in 2030, dramatically reducing the operating costs of the FOGO model of kerbside collection that can still be booked, but is now a collection of small scale, locally owned enterprises. 

Households still contribute to ‘waste collections’ through the rates system.  Instead of funding large scale, non-locally owned ‘services’ to collect ‘waste’, the rates collected provide support to YIMBY in the form of community workers, neighbourhood connectors, expert composting support, food growing skills development, community garden and composting infrastructure.  The jobs funded through this model are high quality and locally connected jobs, they are highly desirable and skilled.

The needs of the community will be determined through hyper local ‘assemblies’ that are supported to make decisions by their community ‘connectors’ who are skilled at bringing people together and problem solving. Not everybody is excited about composting, but everybody has a role to play in the YIMBY model, each household and person is valued for their unique contribution to the whole.

Vision: A world where we are connected in community, minimising and sharing resources and taking responsibility for ‘our own backyard’. A world where people and place are thriving.