Our Team

     Tracie is the founder and co-creator at Sunshine Community Compost and a Manatee County native who lived 17 years in the San Francisco Bay area until 2016. In 2017 she launched Sunshine Community Compost, which emerged from the intersection of her passions for people, planet, creativity, and through years of teachings from mentors, farmers, engineers, social workers, permaculturalists, spiritual teachers, travels, the natural world and ancestral stewards of life and land that came long before her. Tracie's combined experience working in pediatric occupational therapy, community mental health care, nonprofit management, community-based renewable energy, and sustainable and regenerative agriculture set the foundation for the organization. Community work in the early 1990's between a group of indigenous community leaders in Nevada and students helped her begin to realize and start peeling back the layers of understanding related to systemic environmental inequities and the human and ecological consequences that result from disproportionately placed burdens of waste. These early experiences illustrated the interdependence between people and planet and informed her that all voices are not heard with equal resonance in response to human-initiated environmental degradation. An early healthcare career enabled her to work with teams and clients in community settings that worked to get people off the streets, provided comprehensive care for adults with HIV & AIDS, and educated youth in public schools who experienced developmental milestone achievement delays or barriers due to learning challenges or neurological conditions. Community work and sustainability efforts converged when Tracie stepped out of healthcare and began working for GRID Alternatives, facilitating community-based, neighborhood solar energy installation projects with families who qualified as low income  - commonly installed in regions that were inequitably burdened by the impacts of pollution. She has also operated a bicycle-based backyard gardening program, has spent many years educating youth, and spent a year practicing how to grow all her own food after learning closed-loop-system farming from people around the world who grew crops based on calorie density for survival and without the farm and garden inputs so readily available in the west such as imported and easily purchased fertilizer, compost and tools. These experiences deepened her passion for improving human and planetary health and wellness outcomes in relation to gardening and farming, material and energy conservation, reducing the wasting of food, transforming cultural norms around the disposability of people and the planet, turning "waste" into resources and the need to transform as much inedible organic material into soil to grow food and stronger community connections for present and future generations.