Top Photo Credit: Chronogram
The New York State Pollution Prevention Institute (NYSP2I) has selected 10 projects for its 2026-2027 Community Grants Program. Five of the grants target food waste prevention, rescue, and organics diversion. The program, sponsored by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) through the Environmental Protection Fund and administered by Rochester Institute of Technology’s Center for Innovation in Manufacturing and Sustainability, provides nonprofits, academic institutions, and local governments with both money and technical assistance for community-scale pollution prevention. Awards remain subject to contracting and funding availability.
As BioCycle has previously covered, on January 1, 2027, the next tier of the NYS Food Donation and Food Scraps Recycling Law takes effect, pulling in generators averaging one ton per week of wasted food and extending the radius to an organics recycler out to 50 miles. Roughly a year out from that expansion, this grant round is largely an investment in the front end of the system, meaning the collection, education, and behavior change work that determines how much material actually reaches composting facilities and digesters, and in what condition.
Newburgh Receives Two Local Grants
The Newburgh Urban Farm and Food Initiative (NUFFI) received the round’s most infrastructure-forward award, a project to scale food scraps diversion in the City of Newburgh by building on-site composting capacity and expanding farmers market drop-off sites. The initiative pairs the hardware with community training and bilingual outreach, and its stated goal is a replicable, community-controlled model that returns finished compost to local food production. This project will test whether a distributed drop-off network plus modest processing capacity can hold participation once the novelty period ends.
Then, Cornell Cooperative Extension of Orange County will expand its Rescued EATS program in Newburgh, integrating food recovery, culinary workforce training, and community education so that recovered produce becomes ready-to-eat meals rather than feedstock. Having prevention and processing funded in the same city is unusual, and it creates a rare opportunity to observe how the two ends of the hierarchy interact in a single small-city waste shed.
Feeding the Mandate
ResQ2Feed Oneida County will work directly on the generator side, running workshops, targeted outreach, and a structured onboarding process to move food-generating businesses into an active food rescue network while helping them meet state requirements. That is compliance assistance dressed as community outreach, and it is arguably the most policy-leveraged project in the cohort given what 2027 brings for Upstate generators.
Cornell Cooperative Extension of Albany County will equip K-12 teachers and administrators with waste reduction tools, including audits, cafeteria interventions, and diversion systems. Schools are exempt from the state law, which makes voluntary programs the only mechanism available in a sector that generates predictable, high-volume, and relatively clean feedstock.
On Staten Island’s North Shore, Snug Harbor Cultural Center and Botanical Garden will run household-level workshops on meal planning, storage, preservation, and cooking, with an explicit secondary goal of improving participation in organics diversion systems. That second objective is worth tracking, since New York City residential set-out rates remain the limiting factor on curbside organics tonnage.
The Community Grants Program has now supported 193 projects totaling $3.1 million since its inception in 2008, an average of roughly $16,000 per project. The next request for applications is expected in late spring of 2027.
