Gwenn Nolan: From Fear to Action – Building a Sustainable Future One Compost Bin at a Time
As Founder and CEO of Mother Compost, Gwenn transforms environmental anxiety into community-wide action, creating lasting change across the Main Line and beyond.
For Gwenn Nolan, the moment of truth came not from inspiration, but from fear. Standing in her kitchen with a five-month-old baby, overwhelmed by the mounting food waste filling her family’s garbage cans, she couldn’t shake a terrifying thought: What would her children think when they looked back at this moment in history?
“My biggest fear was when my kids are older, they would look at me as every generation does and be like, ‘What were you guys doing?'” Gwenn explains. “And they would have real cause—like you had the iceberg warning in hand. We all watch Titanic and we’re like, ‘Are you the dumbest?’ But that is, to a large extent, kind of how we’re behaving today.”
That moment of maternal anxiety, compounded by postpartum hormones and genuine environmental concern, would spark something extraordinary—though Gwenn admits she wasn’t entirely sure what she was getting into.
Gwenn Nolan is a 2025 Main Line Parent Women of Influence Award Winner
Main Line Parent’s Women of Influence Awards celebrate exceptional women making significant impacts in our community. Gwenn was nominated by a colleague currently collaborating with her company, and selected based on her achievements and dedication to creating positive change in her community. Each Women of Influence Award Winner has committed to support Family Focus Media’s core values. Together, we are committed to foster a sense of belonging and empowerment for all for all families. All backgrounds, races, genders, and sexual orientations are welcome and safe with us.
Beyond the awards, our Women of Influence Luncheons and Speed Networking Night attendees come together as our Women of Influence Network, a community fostering connections, collaboration, and mutual support.
Building Solutions from the Ground Up
What began in 2018 as a focus group with 10 friends has blossomed into Mother Compost, a thriving local business with nearly 1,500 curbside subscribers, 2 bin swap programs, 5 community drop-off sites, and 39 commercial partners. Their mission is simple yet powerful: make composting accessible for everyone, regardless of space, time, or lifestyle.
Seven years in, Mother Compost has diverted over 4 million pounds of food scraps from landfills—a powerful demonstration of how individual actions create collective impact. The company partners with Kitchen Harvest Inc., which processes collected material at Linvilla Orchards in Media, keeping nutrients local and supporting regional soil health.
Gwenn’s path wasn’t traditional. Coming from financial services, she had written the business plan while pregnant but sat with the idea for almost a year. “Either you do something about it or you stop talking about it because you’re annoying yourself,” she recalls. “It’s time to either move in that direction or put that idea down and wait for the next one.”
The early days required pure grit. Gwenn bought a small pickup truck and started at 2 a.m., eventually shifting to 9:30 p.m. starts as her routes grew. She’d work through the night, grab a “disco nap” from 4 to 7 a.m., then get her kids ready for school and head to her day job.
“There was something about being in the quiet, listening to music, and having that time to myself which was not available to me as a mother of three small children that actually gave me energy,” she remembers.
Starting Up With Kids in Tow
Gwenn’s children—now 13, 10, and 7—have been part of Mother Compost since day one. They watched the company start in their basement, where it operated for nearly two years. During early COVID days, her older two even dropped containers at customers’ front doors.
“They are sometimes super proud because they did see the company start,” Gwenn says. “But at times embarrassed, right, because I do not have a traditional job.” She laughs about how her kids often crave the small plastic snack bags they find at friends’ houses —something they don’t have at home with Mother Compost.
Running a mission-based business means challenging the status quo, which can be uncomfortable when kids just want to fit in. “There are times where I’m home late because I was working on hydraulics on a truck, and they’re like, ‘Why couldn’t you have a normal job?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, that wasn’t what the universe had planned for me, and here we are.'”
But ultimately, they understand why she started Mother Compost—not just because they were picky toddlers, but because she wants to change the world for them.
The Turning Point
Growth took off when Gwenn faced a critical crossroads in 2020.. With layoffs looming at her financial services job, her husband working long hours as an essential worker, and three young kids at home—including a two-year-old—she knew she couldn’t juggle it all.
“I really had to decide whether I was going to do Mother Compost or my job and parent because I couldn’t do all three,” she explains. “Leaving Mother Compost at that time would have been like a soul death I wasn’t prepared to weather.”
That leap of faith paid off. What started with Gwenn ripping calendar pages off a bedroom wall—one for each new customer until she reached 100—has become a comprehensive waste diversion service spanning multiple counties.
Breaking Down Barriers, One School at a Time
Mother Compost’s impact shines brightest in schools. The company now serves 12 educational institutions, from Haverford School District elementary schools to universities like Villanova and Neumann. Its partnership with Reading Terminal Market has been particularly transformative, forcing the company to scale up operations and master commercial-level logistics.
Gwenn loves working with schools because children don’t have the resistance adults often do. “There’s no inherent resistance in a child to this concept,” she notes. “That’s something we develop as adults.”
At one elementary school, kitchen staff initially worried about the extra work. But when composting began, parents reported that staff no longer had to take trash out between lunch periods—sometimes not at all during the day. Less waste actually made their jobs easier.
“When you see a seven-year-old who’s like, ‘No problem, I’ll just put it in that container. It’s really not a big deal,’ it does kind of make you think, ‘Why am I making this such a big deal? It’s literally moving my hand millimeters to the left.'”
Meeting People Where They Are
As Mother Compost expands, Gwenn is focused on creating access at different price levels. The current “white glove plan,” as she calls it, includes container cleaning and maximum convenience—perfect for those who need sustainability to be easy to get started or take the leap.
But not everyone wants that level of service. “Some people are like, ‘I don’t mind hosing my bucket if that saves me five bucks a month,'” she says. The company is developing more affordable options and working with municipalities like Lower Merion to place community bins that provide easy access at little to no cost.
The Bigger Picture
Mother Compost addresses a staggering problem: Americans throw away 40% of our food supply annually—108 billion pounds wasted each year while people go hungry. “Food is only wasted when we put it in the trash,” Gwenn points out. “If we can all agree that food isn’t trash, then we need to just figure out how to recycle it.”
For Gwenn, composting represents hope. It’s a tangible way people can participate in solutions rather than feeling overwhelmed by global challenges. Her newsletter themes often center on this concept—giving people practical ways to make a difference.
“When my kids still do sit me down one day and be like, ‘Your generation messed up,’ I can honestly say I really tried,” she reflects. “It may not have been enough. It may have been foolish. I may have made a million mistakes, but I did show up and really try.”
Creating Lasting Impact
Gwenn Nolan’s influence extends far beyond waste diversion statistics. She’s created a model for transforming environmental anxiety into practical action, proving that logistics problems can be solved by determined parents who refuse to sit on the sidelines.
Her story resonates deeply with parents who share her concerns about the world we’re leaving for our children. Rather than remaining paralyzed by global challenges, Gwenn focused on what she could control within her own community—and built something that empowers thousands to do the same.
Through Mother Compost, she’s demonstrated that the most lasting impact comes not from avoiding life’s messiness, but from meeting it head on with purpose and an unwavering commitment to showing up for the next generation.
