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 anonymously 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
since 2000 , 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! |
