Below the Surface: Know your Desert Composter - Haley Preston
A Passion for Healing
When you meet Haley Preston, the founder and director of Desert Compost, the things you notice first are her sparkling smile and merry laughter. Then it occurs to you how carefully she sees and listens to you, giving you her undivided attention. It doesn’t take long before you realize how immensely kind she is, and how dedicated she is to creating inclusive environments for everyone, especially those who often don’t have a voice.
You might not regard these traits as job requirements for a composting director, but they certainly enhance the workspaces of Desert Compost. And they reflect Haley’s long history of service and dedication to healing people and healing the planet.
Haley’s circuitous and non-traditional career path includes experience building rammed-earth dwellings, “earthships,” to address the housing shortage in an environmentally sound way, starting her own farm using bio-dynamic practices, getting a degree in massage and establishing a therapeutic massage business to heal injured bodies, investigating Buddhist thought and meditation practices to be able to care for the minds of her clients just as she was caring for their bodies, and training to become a community and family mediator to focus on conflict resolution and restorative justice. Every step of her journey, while somewhat unusual, actually fits perfectly into the narrative of a modern-day healer, one whose personal and professional goals have been remarkably consistent over the years. She strives to acknowledge the humanity in everyone around her and make sure that they are treated justly, and she tries to protect and tend to the Earth with the same dedication.
After moving to the Coachella Valley in 2020 during the early days of the COVID pandemic, Haley wondered how to safely get out and meet people, and how she could contribute to the community. She began working at the Palm Springs Farmers’ Market, where she heard about California’s Community Composting for Green Spaces (CCGS) grant program. Though she knew nobody when she moved to Palm Springs, she decided to form a community composting group, and began networking to find interested people. She established Desert Compost with many supporters from the UC Master Gardener Program of Riverside County, applied to steward two Coachella Valley composting projects in the first round of the Community Composting For Green Spaces grant through CalRecycle, and in November 2021 began Desert Compost’s first community composting site at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church in Palm Desert. Desert Compost partnered with the enthusiastic staff of the Neighbors 4 Neighbors program at St. Margaret’s to create a closed loop food system: Organic waste from FIND Food Bank deliveries, provided weekly to families in the program, are composted instead of being sent to the landfill. This rich compost, which is used to improve soil quality in the Good Earth Garden on church grounds, produces food and herbs which can be distributed back to the community.
Since then, Desert Compost has assisted in developing two more sites, at the McCarthy Family Child Development Center at College of the Desert, and at United Methodist Church in Palm Springs. CalRecycle announced a second round of community composting grants in 2022 (CCGS2), and Desert Compost was awarded a significant grant to establish 12 additional composting sites throughout the Inland Empire as well as support the current sites. Desert Compost also won a grant from the Coachella Valley Mountains Conservancy in 2023 to enhance local conservation efforts and combat climate change through education on regenerative practices in community outreach presentations and training programs in Coachella Valley middle and high schools. Haley’s leadership, her tenacity and hard work, and her willingness to continue advocating for composting programs while facing many early setbacks and a host of “no’s,“ were instrumental in obtaining these two new grants in addition to the initial grant.
Desert Compost is dedicated to mitigating climate change through reducing methane emissions, enhancing soil quality and increasing water retention. As the Director of Desert Compost, Haley Preston has changed the climate equation in the Coachella Valley through her tireless work, and presented our community with a golden opportunity to work together to heal the earth.