Regenerating Wildfire Lands with Soil Makers

Wildfire relief

City of Los Angeles (select only if your project has a citywide benefit) County of Los Angeles (select only if your project has a countywide benefit)

Pilot or new project, program, or initiative (testing or implementing a new idea)

Wildfires destroy not just trees and homes, but the living soil beneath our feet. They leave behind toxic fire retardants, compacted earth, and land that can no longer absorb water. Soil allows water to be filtered and stored in underground aquifers, these aquifers are large bodies of water that pull in clouds and play a huge role in our water cycle. Without soil, the stormwater runs off, polluting the ocean, and bypassing our aquifers, breaking the natural water cycle and accelerating desertification.
At the same time, Los Angeles produces over 4,000 tons of food waste daily—waste that could be turned into soil to restore burned land, grow trees, prevent fires, and sequester carbon. Yet most of it ends up in landfills, creating methane pollution and missed opportunities for healing.
Let's connect the dots, food waste either becomes pollution or it becomes the solution, imagine what it would feel like to to know that your food scraps were helping stop climate change.

This is a community-powered initiative to restore fire-scarred landscapes and reconnect residents to the land through composting and soil-making.
We will install 50+ handcrafted Soil Makers in wildfire-impacted neighborhoods, school gardens, and parks in areas like Malibu, Pacific Palisades, and Altadena. These in-ground worm towers turn food scraps into living soil, helping to detoxify fire retardants, retain water, regrow vegetation, and reconnect communities to the natural cycle of regeneration.
The program includes community-led installations, soil-making workshops, student-led compost teams, and the distribution of the How to Make Soil book as an educational tool. Each Soil Maker becomes a visible, beautiful symbol of healing—inviting participation, pride, and environmental action from the ground up.
The food scraps become the soil, that feed the trees, that sequester carbon, that stops climate change and processes the organic matter before it becomes pollution. Everyday people get to contribute and be part a local and global solution every single day, by doing something they're already doing, throwing away their trash! We're already in the habit of throwing our trash in different bins, unfortunately most of it still goes to the same place, the landfills were it becomes pollution.

If successful, neighborhoods once marked by disaster will become symbols of regeneration—dotted with Soil Makers, feeding trees, refilling aquifers, and reconnecting people to nature. Stormwater will sink in. Youth will grow up empowered. LA will be cleaner, greener, and more resilient. It's time to stop hacking at the branches and start planting new seeds. This will open the door to more and more decentralized composting that
The Soil Makers can help make Los Angeles the most sustainable city in the world. By turning food waste into living soil, we’ll stop landfill pollution, regenerate topsoil, restore the water cycle, and create ecological buffers that prevent future wildfires. In fire-impacted communities like the Palisades and Eaton Canyon, we’ll offer hope—transforming loss into life and problems into solutions.
We're helping people connect and nurture the land, connect to themselves, to each other and to their city.