Blessed Holidays All!

As you consider end of the year planning and giving to those things you believe in and want to see continue on the planet and in your ‘hood, please remember the bees!

If you missed our 2017 Summer Pollinator Week swarm funding event, I invite you to consider Think Like a Bee as part of your year end giving. We are truly grateful for all the ways you support this effort of education and advocacy on behalf of pollinators and humans. Bees give us so much. This is an opportunity to give back to that which supports pollinators and future generations who will care for them.

This upcoming year, thanks to a partial JustPax grant, we will have the opportunity to connect Indigenous youth with their elders for interviews—creating the Rio Grande Watershed Story Project. They will examine crucial issues of water, land and colonization here in New Mexico. This project will give youth a chance to sit with their elders and understand the complexity, importance and need to reverence and protect our land and watershed.

…to bring the narratives of those” colonized” who have lived as land based, agricultural people, to the settler communities, who have been part of the colonizing effort, often unwittingly. It is an opportunity to become more aware of who are our “neighbors” , our own history as settlers and the possibility of creating a new narrative for future generations in our watershed. (The Rio Grande Watershed Story Project)

This past year 2017 Think Like a Bee partnered with the City of Albuquerque Open Space to host a pollinator festival.

We celebrated the founding of Burque Bee City USA for our fair city!

We ran a summer farm internship where youth learned life skills such as the ethic of hard work, teamwork, food as medicine, and showing up on time, alongside the daily growing of healthy organic food: soil composition, bee keeping 101, composting, seeds, hoop house growing and irrigation.

We were able to provide them all a summer stipend. Ten more youth without nature deficit. Ten youth who didn’t sit in front of their screens all summer. Ten youth who had an amazing hands on experience and made new friends across cultural boundaries and language.

They attended The Council of All Beings, where they made masks of animals and spoke through the voices of these silent ones to tell us humans something we need to hear for this time. The voices of wolf, sunflower, bear, cat, deer and so many others were profound and from the heart.

We visited Los Poblanos garden, lavender fields and lavender oil processing plant.

Many of the youth overcame their fear of bees to become proficient in basic beekeeping!

We learned about native bees from Lulu Sage and built casitas for them.

Every week the youth went off to market like little piggy wiggy, to meet the public and share their growing knowledge of food.

We had a blowout potluck with parents and siblings, celebrating and graduating our youth with honors  in a special sacred ceremony.

Thanks to my incredible colleagues, who made it possible!

Next year we have high hopes to continue our youth farmer internship, and we look forward to our Rio Grande Watershed Story project which will teach youth media skills as well as immerse them in the stories of our New Mexican elders.

With pollinators continuing to decline and facing a steady struggle for a healthy habitat and eco-system, Think Like A Bee will work on behalf of education and advocacy locally and statewide.

I hope you’ll support our work. Thank you!

click here to make a tax deductible donation on Paypal

Tax deductible checks can be made out to PES and sent c/o PES, P.O. Box 6531, Albuquerque, NM 87197. Please put “THINK LIKE A BEE” in the memo line.

Have a blessed holidays with those you celebrate, serve and love.

bzzz.

 

Think Like A Bee is a tax exempt organization in the State of New Mexico