Kensington Town Hall Compost Hub was opened in 2018 after years of campaigning and activism by community members, including the founding Kensington Compost committee whose groundbreaking work was finalist in the Premier’s Sustainable Awards.

City of Melbourne made the fenced area behind Kensington Town Hall available for a dedicated compost hub, along with a site at the Newmarket Sales Yards for a community garden, and engaged 3000Acres to facilitate a series of planning and community engagement workshops. Separate committees were formed to manage the respective sites as a “Closed Loop Food Project” and to further the interests of local composters and food gardeners.

In the years that followed, Town Hall Compost Committee negotiated an agreement with City of Melbourne to maintain open-access public composting, and developed an active community of composters using the facility every week, maintaining and turning the piles, and using the compost produced for local projects. Using the techniques developed at the hub, we then expanded the composting to three new locations, facility-only composting sites at The Venny and KCCC, and a further public site at Kensington Estate.

Based on our vision of supporting Kensington residents to conserve and process all of their organic waste locally, we continued to support further expansion sites at Kensington Estate, and Christ Church Church and provided support to the various other community-led composting activities across the suburb.

Through the Kensington Circular Economy Precinct Pilot Project funded by Sustainability Victoria in 2023 we acquired a compost cargobike which is now in use to support the growing network of community operated composting sites across Kensington and produce increasing amounts of valuable resources for our growing community and local food systems.

In 2024, the Kensington Town Hall Compost Hub Management Committee elected to incorporate as an association, and in consultation with other community organisations, formed Kensington Town Hall Compost Incorporated under the model rules supplied by Consumer Affairs Victoria.

Our commitment to developing the site at Town Hall into a welcoming communal space continues, with projects to establish a nutrient circularity food garden, an interactive habitat garden, maintaining the use of the space to support the various satellite compost stations now spread across Kensington, building mutually supporting relationships with other organisations, spread awareness, and ensuring continued uptake and longevity of the services we offer to the community.

With a dedicated group of compost volunteers and a passionate network of supporters both around Kensington and further afield across Australia, we are excited about how this work serves to enhance our neighbourhood, build opportunity for social connections, re-evaluate our relationship with the surrounding ecological forces we depend on to survive, and allow us all to live respectfully as guests on this amazing Country we have been welcomed onto.

This website is designed to serve as an online hub, to help residents and visitors alike find composting resources, connect with new opportunities and to grow and develop together further as a community.