Land Together at the Cultivating Community Composting Forum
Land Together was proud to be represented at this year’s Cultivating Community Composting Forum in Sacramento, where Michelle Mondia, our Program Manager at the California Institution for Women, was invited to serve as the keynote speaker.
Michelle leads Land Together’s garden program at CIW, supporting incarcerated participants through hands-on, land-based learning and care. She also brings more than fifteen years of experience as a death midwife, with deep practice in home funerals, green burials, and culturally grounded end-of-life care. Michelle is the founder of the Death Workers Alliance, which connects BIPOC end-of-life practitioners working in and with marginalized communities, as well as The Thin Veil, which offers direct end-of-life support to individuals and families.
The forum’s theme this year was Breaking New Ground, and Michelle’s keynote powerfully reframed composting as an ethic of care rather than a technical practice. Weaving together stories of Land Together’s prison gardens, wildfire recovery in her community of Altadena, and human composting, she illustrated how transformation becomes possible when we stay in relationship with what has been discarded.
Across bodies, institutions, and landscapes, the talk challenged participants to see “breaking new ground” as slow, messy, collective work rooted in responsibility, regeneration, and long-term care.
Michelle also brought What Grows Here, the first known herbarium created inside a prison, to be displayed at the conference. Developed with incarcerated women at the California Institution for Women, the collection features pressed plants from the prison grounds paired with reflections on endurance, care, and return, positioning the women not as objects of study but as authors and knowledge holders bearing witness to what continues to grow under constraint.
The Cultivating Community Composting Forum is an annual national gathering organized by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR). It brings together community-scale composters, activists, and policymakers to share best practices and advance decentralized, community-based composting systems. The forum is hosted in partnership with the California Alliance for Community Composting and the U.S. Composting Council’s COMPOST2026 conference.
We were honored to have Land Together’s work and values represented at this gathering, and we are deeply proud of Michelle for the leadership, thoughtfulness, and care she brings to this work.
