The Center for Civic Participation

Beehive Design Collective

VOTER WORK

DESCRIPTION

The Beehive’s mission: To cross-pollinate the grassroots, by creating collaborative, anti-copyright images that can be used as educational and organizing tools.

In the process of this effort we seek to take the “who made that!?� and “how much does it cost!?� out of our creative endeavors, by anonomously functioning as word-to-image translators of the information we convey. We build, and disseminate these visual tools with the hope that they will self-replicate, and take on life of their own.

The Hivestory… The work of the Beehive Collective has three major facets: the Hive is appreciated internationally for its educational graphics campaigns, at a regional level for it’s stone mosaic murals and apprentice program, and locally for it’s dedication to the revitalization of the old Machias Valley Grange Hall, a landmark building in our small, rural town. The Hive has been going and growing for four years now, at full speed!

Organizational structure and composition… We are rooted in rural Eastern Maine, but are a very decentralized swarm. There are usually six backbone bees at any given time, with a current count of twenty eight total, and many other autonomous pollinators scattered throughout the Americas that have small pieces of the Beehive’s work integrated into their own individual activist efforts…. and countless other folks functioning as individual researchers and storytellers!

At this point in our evolution, our organism is entirely volunteer run. No one gets paid, but some folks that have been more involved occasionally have their expenses of room and board covered by the projects they are dedicated to. We have no queen, and make decisions by modified consensus process. The priorities for our work are set by the requests we receive from collaborators, audiences, and our advisory bees… aiming to stay flexible and organic enough to respond to current events, and mass-pollination opportunities.

Some examples of the busy bee metaphor: ---The Hive has now distributed over 55,000 posters, completely by hand (not sold in stores) over our few years of existence. Hooray for the grassroots!

---Each year, operating purely on a donation basis, and giving over half away for free, we raised 90% of our budget from these interactions! We attribute this strange miracle to the desperate need for more healthy, and visual representation of the complex and overwhelming issues our society is facing.

---Each year our little swarm presents narrative picture-lectures about globalization and the global justice movement at over 200 locations in the Western Hemisphere! All of these events were organized by grassroots, word of mouth, efforts. We receive multiple requests for our presentations every day, and have been scrambling to create a formal training structure to have more SpeakerBees available for this overwhelming response to our work.

Yes, the Hive’s work is ambitious, overwhelming, organic, thrilling, effective, challenging, stressful and moving forward in ways we never never imagined. Us Bees are in the throes of an adventure that is constantly unfolding- consistently testing our own limits. So far, the return on that effort has been phenomenal, something you'd need to see to believe. We've learned to not take lightly the metaphor of busy bees or ants carrying fifty times their own body weight… our one guarantee for wannabees joining forces with our swarm: NEVER BORING!

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