Waste Hater: Nurture BK
A teacher knows the value of nurturing students to grow and fulfill their potential. She also knows how those principles can extend beyond the classroom into the backyard.
Anneliese Zausner-Manne, an elementary school teacher in New York, considers Brooklyn her backyard. All of Brooklyn. She was born here, raised here, and remains a proud resident of the city’s most popular borough, through good times and bad.
During a recent “bad spell” - i.e. the COVID-19 pandemic - Zausner-Manne watched her neighborhood shut down and lose a bit of its life. All services were suspended, including city-wide composting, which was of great value to the community.
As a long-time composter, Zausner-Manne couldn’t take the neglect. She refused to let valuable resources go to waste in her backyard.
Instead, she’d do it on her own.
Zausner-Mannee partnered with her neighbor Christina (and Christina’s husband), and launched a project called Nurture BK, a pop up center by Prospect Park, where locals could drop off their compost while the city service was halted. They collected 300 pounds on the first day, renting a U-Haul to bring it to a guy who transported it to farms upstate.
It was makeshift, but it worked. And each week, the project grew exponentially. Now, even with the city service resumed, Nurture BK has become a routine Sunday morning for Zausner-Manne and her tribe of volunteers, serving nearly 400 customers each week.
“My mother is a first generation New Yorker, my father is off the boat, I’ve always grown up in an area that had community,” Zausner-Manne tells Replate. “Community is part of my life. Because of that and because of what happened during COVID, the project took off organically and went from there.”
She adds, “Communities can’t be created. We can manufacture a lot of things, but not community. It’s a part of New York and definitely Brooklyn.”
Every Sunday, from 9-11am, Zausner-Manne sees a steady flow of people from the neighborhood and elsewhere dropping off food scraps into large bins provided by the organization. When popularity surged, the team added a community table, where people could share edible food they no longer needed or other unwanted items from their homes.
“A lot of people were dropping off good food that was totally fine, they just weren’t going to eat it,” Zausner-Manne explains. “This really climaxed during Halloween. We had all these pumpkins that were edible. So, in Winter, we put out the community fridge table, and people started coming to collect items they needed. Some now rely on it.”
Zausner-Manne embraces the idea of mutual aid - “give what you can, take what you need” - as a fundamental principle of Nurture BK. She also aims to change the paradigm of waste streams, and how we look at the second life of our resources.
“If you really examine the food scraps, it’s a little like donation dumping, where people don’t want it going to a landfill, so feel they should compost,” she notes.
By “donation dumping,” Zausner-Manne refers to the act of dropping off donated items with no regard for the necessity or utility the organization may have for those donations. Often, when food or other items are passed off this way, they end up getting wasted rather than used with purpose.
Zausner-Manne adds, “I don’t want to waste good food, I want to give it to someone else.”
Nurture BK is not-for-profit and volunteer run, though they are currently sponsored in part by the city. Sometimes they fundraise, but mostly, it’s driven by a desire to keep Brooklyn clean, healthy and connected.
Perhaps the bigger hope is habitual change, and greater understanding for the role of sustainability in community. Visitors at Nurture BK learn about how they can reuse their scraps; they explore what packaging is truly compostable and what’s false advertising; they use the opportunity for whatever advantage they see fit.
As Zausner-Manne points out, everyone interprets zero waste differently.
“Without a doubt, this has deepened my connection to Brooklyn, and understanding of this world,” says Zausner-Manne. “We are serving this neighborhood with intersectional environmentalism - it’s about Environmental Justice. We are very aware that the ability to know about composting is a privilege. Our community consists of consciously, environmentally driven people who are trying to make this world a better place.”
To learn more about Nuture BK, visit their website.
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