Help Launch the Tierras Verdes Bee Collective

The Globeville Elyria Swansea Coalition is raising $8,500 to launch the Tierras Verdes Bee Collective at the Tierras Verdes Food Forest, a community-owned green space where neighbors grow food, learn together, celebrate culture, and practice environmental justice.

Over the past decade, GES Coalition has worked alongside neighbors to bring environmental justice to Globeville, Elyria, and Swansea. In 2024, through its Tierra Colectiva Community Land Trust, the coalition purchased land to plant the Tierras Verdes Food Forest: a garden that mimics a forest ecosystem and supports food, medicinal and culinary herbs, shade, climate resilience, pollinator habitat, and community gathering.

Now, neighbors are ready to grow the next layer of that work: a Bee Collective rooted in care, training, and right relationship with the land.

Rather than rushing to install honeybee hives before the site and stewards are fully ready, we are taking this year to prepare. From now through spring 2027, the Bee Collective will bring neighbors together to support native pollinators, learn beekeeping skills, build pollinator habitat, and create a shared care structure before welcoming honeybees to the Food Forest.

This year, your gift will help us:

• Form the Tierras Verdes Bee Collective, a group of residents and volunteers who will learn together and share responsibility for bee and pollinator care

• Provide bee training and hands-on learning so neighbors understand honeybee care, native pollinator habitat, hive safety, seasonal maintenance, mite treatment, feeding, harvesting, and winter preparation

• Plant pollinator-friendly native plants and expand habitat for bees, butterflies, and other beneficial insects

• Install and maintain native pollinator supports, including pollinator baths, a pollinator hotel, nesting materials, and habitat areas for solitary and ground-nesting bees

• Host family-friendly workshops where children and adults can make native wildflower seed bombs, paint hive boxes, learn about pollinators, and connect with the Food Forest

• Map the site’s flowering plants, water sources, shade, nesting areas, and best hive locations so that bees can be introduced responsibly

• Purchase basic bee equipment, including hive boxes, starter colonies, protective gear, feeding supplies, mite treatment, supplements, and future harvest supplies

• Prepare to establish two honeybee hives in spring 2027, when the season is right and the Bee Collective is ready

This project is about helping neighbors build a living classroom for food sovereignty, climate resilience, youth education, traditional ecological knowledge, and community care.

Bees remind us that survival is collective. They teach us that small acts, repeated with care, can feed whole communities. At Tierras Verdes, the Bee Collective will help children, families, elders, gardeners, and neighbors learn how pollinators support our food system, and how we can support them in return.

Help us build the Bee Collective now, so that when the bees arrive in 2027, they arrive into a community already prepared to care for them.