Incubating Poop, Incubating People
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Compost needs time.
When we collect poop from a Toilet Equity toilet, it isn't compost yet. We can give it carbon, air, moisture and time. We can tend the conditions.
But we can't make compost.
A whole living ecosystem does that.
Bacteria and fungi break things down. Tiny organisms feed on what they find and become food for others. Each part affects the others. Slowly, together, they turn something most of us think of as waste into dark, rich soil.
We've been thinking a lot about that ecosystem lately, and about our own.
Before Crystal worked for Toilet Equity, she used our toilets. She had been living without stable housing for nearly 15 years.
Then one day, she saw that the toilets were dirty.
So she cleaned them.
Nobody asked her to. She saw something her community needed and did it. Then she did it again.
Eventually, we noticed and offered her a job.
It didn't take long before they became her toilets.
Crystal knew who used them. She recruited people to help move sawdust and keep them clean. She knew what needed attention before anyone else did.
“That’s my job,” she says. “That’s my name on there.”
Today, Crystal is Toilet Equity's Operations Technician.
There's a much longer story between those two sentences. It's a story about work, disappearance and return; about losing places to live and eventually finding a home; about what it means to leave room for someone, and what that person contributes in return.
But perhaps the most important thing Crystal's story reminds us is this:
None of us exists outside the ecosystem.
The people who use the toilets. The people who care for them. The people who haul sawdust and compost. The people who notice what needs doing. The people who give money so this work can keep happening.
We contribute different things. We need different things. And we create the conditions for one another.
No one gets to claim what grows from those conditions.
Sometimes it's soil. Sometimes it's belonging.
And sometimes it's an Operations Technician named Crystal, making damn sure her toilets are clean.
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This article originally appeared in our October 2026 email newsletter. You can subscribe to receive future updates here.
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