a. The main goal of this project is to bring the art and science of composting to the community through series of hands-on seminars promoting awareness about the importance of how composting can sustain our Earth. Further, the project aimed at assisting the community in organic waste management and Social Entrepreneurship which means income can be generated from the sale of compost soil and compost tea (and in some cases BSF larvae).

b. With only RM4,600 grant, fundraising was greatly needed since the expenses were too high. We are having a fundraising activities among team members and UiTMers volunteer, we sell breakfast and lunch pack at Blok Karyawan Vendor, UiTM Johor. We also sell dinner pack from door to door at our hostel and selling foods and our organic fertiliser during an event at St. Philip Segamat Catholic Church. In addition, we managed to harvest our BSF larvae, compost soil and compost tea – we sold quite a number of it. Finally, we innovated our own mini compost bin and managed to sell a few at U-Sentral Mall Segamat.

c. Grounded on 3E (Educating, Empowering, and Entrepreneurship) our project embarked on, Educating – we are educating all the people out there especially our main target beneficiaries which is the people from Orang Asli Bekoh, students from secondary and UiTM’s and focusing to teach and make them understand what is the art of composting about and how we can generate income and reducing costs through the art. Empowering – coaching (and later on) becoming coach in action/practice to find solution on how organic waste management can sustain our Mother Earth. Entrepreneurship – the end product of this project which is compost soil, compost tea and BSF larvae benefited the community as it can be generating additional income.

I. High level of difficulty was faced in conducting our project as we have very small amount of grant. Expectation from the society was too high when they know that we are having grant. It was not wise for us to tell how small our grant is as it will give bad image to our sponsor. Therefore, we have to cope with these difficulties by fundraising and approached our project in lower cost but impactful result at the same time. We have to reduce number of team members too (to cut costs).

II. There were not much cultural barriers that we face in conducting our project. Only a minor one when we encountered typical peoples who think composting is a dirty thing to do or (religiously unclean). Language barrier is not a big problem because we have translators along the way, after all we conversed in bilingual and national language to reach out to our audience.

III. Excellent microbes and bacteria works wonders on our side. Local micro-organism including BFS (black flies solders) greatly assisted our composting activities. Amazingly, we managed to harvest our compost in a very short period of time. Unfortunately, all our members were tied up with the study that caused some of us became victims of circumstances.

IV. The people that have benefited from our project directly, is categorize into 3 categories. Secondary School students, UiTMers and the Orang Asal community. Indirectly, our project will benefit the Mother Earth, the organic farmers and the family members of our direct audiences when they shared the art of composting to them. The by-products enhance nutrients in our food supply chains.

V. Our project will be continuous as there are demands from other schools who want us to share about the art and science of composting to their students. Since composting is in the syllabus, school teachers wanted us to come over to their schools to give hands-on activity the students. However, because of our limited resources, currently, we are not able to meet their demands. We believe that we should teach children from a young age to learn about how to manage organic waste properly as it is easier to make it a habit at a young age.

VI. As for the Orang Asli community, we are teaching them to learn how to manage their waste and how to generate income from the compost to be sold as organic compost soil. Since the Orang Asli community has difficulties to manage their waste in their compound, we are teaching them the art and science of composting as a start to learn to manage their waste and the same time to generate income for themselves. They are also growing vegetables for domestic consumption and our project is an added value to them. This has to be a continuous effort.

a. We strongly believe that our project has contributed towards happiness. Firstly, we are helping to make the community or the place that we live in, a better place by managing our organic waste in the right way. Our project does not only impact knowledge on the art and science of composting but it also indirectly building awareness on the fact that we can turn organic waste into something useful such as taking better care of our mother earth and providing an extra income to a community. Some of them were not aware that we can do something about orange and apple peels before, as most of us would throw it away. We are showing that we can turn something that most people know as garbage into an organic compost soil as well as compost tea to help crops to grow a lot healthier as it provide nutrients to the soil. Organic farmers too can widely smile as our project provide them with Black Gold such as compost.

This project has changed me in a lot of ways. I have seen how children, students and Orang Asli community are so grateful for our effort to help them and to show them the art and science of composting in the right way. It just shows how valuable knowledge is and some people do not have the opportunity to gain knowledge. We have this knowledge plus the ability to bring happiness to people. We are glad that we did it and experiencing how big the impact it has towards the communities. I also happy to see the spirit of the 3 families from there where they are very courage and wanted to do organic compost as well we have taught them. Based on the result of compost that they have done, they have seen the changes of their plants in terms of its growth. They believe that organic compost may help them to reduce their cost by only make it by themselves and us it.

b. Before we embark into this project, we were quite sceptical if this is going to make people happy. It seems to be just a tiny dot, but turned out that the impact was so great. Happily, we presented and exhibited the idea of this project, with a proper system of composting, we have been awarded with Bronze Award in a University program which is the Graduate Digital Invention Innovation and Design 2019 (Graduate Digital IID 2019) at UiTM Terengganu., and it became a major turning point – many out there are happier than ever.

Thus, “I hope to see participative actions on environment care through our project on composting at Orang Asli Settlement next in the future” (Allan Valentine Augustine).