One-BEEing, Hartford

One-BEEing, Hartford is a city-wide collaboration, partnering Knox, Inc., Community Solutions, the Hartford hOur Exchange, Hartford Food Systems, Grow Hartford, the Keney Park Sustainability Program, Rise Up, Summer of Solutions, Blue Earth Compost.... and YOU!

Our goal is to promote large scale community education and engagement in natural beekeeping and community gardening, within the city of Hartford. To obtain our objective we have created a Youth-oriented Beekeeping and Community Gardening progam to raise awareness of the relationship between the honeybee population and our food supply, as well as our relationship to our environment and each other. One-BEEing, Hartford seeks to help the honeybees so that the honeybees can help us.

It is never too early to introduce the next generation to the importance of working together and environmental awareness. The One-BEEing Hartford campaign takes a natural, organic approach to beekeeping with a biodynamic influence, treating soil fertility, plant growth, Human stewardship and Honeybee care as ecologically interrelated tasks.

We have established two of our projected four hives within the city, will use the funds we raise to purchase colonies for our other hives, safety equipment for our participants, as well as the gardening tools and seeds we will need to begin planting our bee-friendly habitats throughout the community.

We will also begin conducting regular workshops and meetings with our project participants and the community. Through partnerships with local scholls we will begin pollinator programs. Students can learn basic biology by raising butterfy gardens in their the classrooms, as well as pollinator friendly plants that can be transplanted outdoors.

By next Spring we will be able to begin harvesting honey and pollen, introducing our participants to entrepreneurship and cooperative economics!

Connecticut lost over 40% of its bee hives last year, we want to raise awareness of this fact and the importance of the honeybees to our food supply. We also want to use our efforts to and the metaphor of the bee hive to foster collaboration throughout our city and to promote collective work and responsibility.

We believe that our program takes a very holistic approach to fostering environmentalism, food justice, community building and sustainability. These four areas of concentration play a major role in how we relate to each other as human beings and to the planet we live on. If we want to insure a better future for our youth then we need to reconnect to Mother Nature and to our own... Human nature!

“The holistic acupuncturist and the sea turtle rescuer may not be able to explain the feeling, 'We are serving the same thing,' but they are. Both are in service to an emerging story of the People that is the defining mythology of a new kind of civilization.” ~Charles Eisenstein