🌿 Hi, nice to meet you!
The Velveteen Bean is more than compost — it’s a living experiment in closing local waste loops and growing climate hope you can touch. Every pile, person and compost hub is proof that hope can be local, visible, and alive.
✨ No need to get it right, just get it going.
We need neighbors, cafés, and gardens willing to try, tinker, and see what happens when we keep waste close to home.
Want in? Let’s co-create climate hope, have fun, get dirt(y). 🌱☕
How to Join the Soil Network
Microbes don’t work alone; neither should we. Big facilities shouldn’t gatekeep compost. Imagine never having to buy dead dirt again, because every block was making living soil for all.
Compost Loop
Ask cafés and other small businesses to put up a free “Grounds to Ground” sticker. It’s a signal: we help turn scraps into soil. Climate action can happen in small ways, at home. Let me know about it.
Neighborhood Soil Hubs
You don’t have to maintain a full compost pile to be part of the loop. Adopt a pile to support someone else, give away compost worms, keep collected coffee grounds in a porch bucket for fellow composters, or pass scraps to the next stage in the process.
Everyday Allies
Drink coffee? Grow your own food? Just curious? You don’t need a compost pile to be part of the loop. Ask your café to save grounds, share our story, or simply cheer on small, scrappy ideas.
Tell me your idea - maggie@thevelveteenbean.com
Commons Call:
Trashpocalypse ⚙️
Online edition
SHOW N’ TELL
WED NOVEMBER 5th 6pm PST, 5ish min per person
Got scraps? Trash-art, weird brews, dumpster scores? Bring it. The only rule: it has to be trash (compost counts 😉).
5ish minutes to show or tell. No polish, no algorithms, no perfection. Just trash turned into treasure, waste into renewal, and a little shot of #climatehope from hearing how creative people are coping with collapse.
Join me online. Bay Area? Say hi — this may go IRL soon.
email me, say you’re a garbage person, & I’ll send link on Nov 5th, 6pm pst
✨ Free, casual, imperfect.
What to Expect 🐇
✨ Show & Tell → about 5 minutes each to
share your pile, patch, potion, or half-baked experiment.
✨ No Pressure → come with trash, compost,
or nothing at all. Lurkers welcome (if you’re nice!)
✨ Messy > Polished → we’re here for scraps, not slideshows or Ted talks.
✨ Cheering Section → claps, wows, and “wait, how’d you do that?”
✨ #ClimateHope → tiny sparks of joy in messy, unraveling times.
And honestly? It might just be you and me this first time
— but that’s still a Commons, right?!
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Why the Bunny
🐇 Why the Bunny (and Coffee)
The Velveteen Bean started with compost — coffee grounds from local cafes, rabbit bedding from rescues, scraps pulled from the waste stream and given a second life in soil. The bunny showed up: soft but resilient, multiplying quietly, carrying life forward, often in hostile conditions. -
Hi, I’m Maggie.
I used to produce shiny campaigns for big brands. The polished stuff. But it drained me, all gloss, no soul and I could feel my creativity slipping away.
Now I’d rather dig in compost and play with worms. The Velveteen Bean is my outlet; part garden projects, part digital creative playground, part community-building experiment.
What lights me up? Turning trash into treasure, pulling people together, and making silly, hopeful experiments in joy, even in messy, unraveling times.
I’ve always loved The Common stuff. I’ve always been a dumpster diver, seeing resource where others see waste. The Velveteen Bean is just that impulse made visible: caring for what’s here, sharing it, and finding joy in how others show up too, imperfectly, but wanting to see a waste-less future.