After taking 2020 mostly off, Pollinate Minnesota has begun growing back slowly and intentionally.
We’ve been able to safely teach our classes again, and continue to have the honor of being around others’ bravery as they beekeep for the first time. This year, we explored our live honey bees hives with over 300 youth and connected with another 1000 through visits and virtual programs. That’s around a quarter of the people we were able to work with pre-pandemic.
These experiences are fun. They bring peace, calm, excitement, joy- all of which all of us need more of.
As you may know, Pollinate Minnesota has been and is now a one-person organization. The time and capacity I have as Erin is the time and capacity Pollinate Minnesota has. And in 2021 my time and capacity has been smaller.
For the past year, I’ve been privileged to lend my expertise and time to the Pollinator Stewardship Council as their Interim Program Director, helping them find a full-time person to grow their essential national work to defend managed and native pollinators from the adverse impact of pesticides. In October, I joined the GMCC board. GMCC has deep roots in food security and justice work through their MN Food Share program and is growing Minnesota Venture Farms from those roots: an enterprise that is led by a collective of BIPOC farmers, agricultural leaders, and food entrepreneurs. MVF builds a new, equitable food ecosystem including BIPOC land ownership, new distribution channels, and co-designed microenterprises.
I’ve leant my voice in support of Urban Roots for their 2020 Not Your Garden Variety Show, to MN 350 in support of the Headwaters Community Food and Water Bill through their Nourish podcast (I got to be in conversation with LaChelle Cunningham! Headwaters For Bees and People episode here.) Pollinate Minnesota was honored to loan bees to Baby Cakes Book Stack for reading events with Justice and Kamie Page (support the Page Foundation here) of their book Bee Love (Can Be Hard) which I am so humbled to have provided pollinator fact-checking for!
And- I grew a person! My second child Garnet was born in Feb, and with the step back that I/Pollinate Minnesota took in 2020, I had the ability to take more space to be with her and my older daughter this year.
As a one-person organization, my health is also the health of Pollinate Minnesota. I have depression and anxiety which take their own space in my life, and, after Garnet’s birth, my postpartum depression exponentially grew that space. This year I have finally given myself/Pollinate Minnesota space to treat these illnesses, to heal my mind.
I’ve long held the adage of growing slow to grow fast and that organizations, work and productively need to reflect the lived experience of us- humans with bodies, emotions, families, lives. I’ve been holding that close as I’ve been reading and rereading Sonya Renee Taylor’s The Body is Not an Apology (this episode!) and adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy. Both of these organizing frames hold the small inside-my-mind-and-body-work as necessary work that fractals bigger.
I’ve been able to take time this year, and my illness has needed that time, for this ‘small’ healing work inside my mind. As a white person, having the privilege to take this space, to slowly grow my organization with intention, continues to be a place where my guilt resides. But that guilt isn’t serving me, the pollinators, the broader movement. And I do believe the small reflects to the big. 2022 feels to me like my year to delve into Pollinate Minnesota more deeply, to work to externalize the dreams I’ve envisioned these last 7 years. It’s work I had held for 2020 :)
And the work is big. The EPA is a catastrophe, functioning as designed, to legalize the use of thousands of poisons on our food and in our ecosystems, with blatant disregard to the science. These are poisons we know to cause harm to our bodies, the bees, the water, the land, all while placing the burden of proving this scientific knowing on our shoulders, as the individuals living through these harms.
You need only look at the 2021 Minnesota Legislative Session to see this corruption play out in our state, where the republican controlled Senate wouldn’t make the simple lift of restricting seeds coated in neonics from being used in ethanol production to prevent another atrocity like the ongoing community poisoning experienced in Mead, Nebraska.
Our bravery is needed. Our radical self-love is needed. Our patience, our calm, our joy, our fun, are needed. Pollinate Minnesota remains dedicated to the work, weaving my small learnings into the ongoing, collective, collaborative movement.
We are so honored to be building in community with you all. Our hearts have been and continue to be with you all. Sending appreciation, hope and resilience,
Erin Rupp
*originally posted for Give to the Max Day 2021.