Our mission is to help educate, engage and connect the local Worthing community with nature, conservation and pollinators through a series of collaborative activities, workshops, volunteering opportunities and projects that cater to the evolving needs of the local environment around us. And to this end, we have already achieved a huge amount. Connecting and engaging with groups of like minded local volunteers; all passionate about the environment, their community and strengthening pollinators through beekeeping and expansion of our green space.
None of this would have been at all possible without the vital funding received throughout the year:
The South Downs National Park Trustin partnership with South Downs National Park Authority very generously donated a significant sum early on in the project which enabled us to kickstart the build of the site. We also very gratefully received an award from the Postcode Local Trust and much ongoing funding and support from Adur & Worthing Council. This has all really helped to bring this project to life.
The Sussex Community Foundation recently awarded us a phenomenal £5,000 ‘Rampion Fund’ enabling us to run a very exciting programme of ‘family fun’ activities and events this summer for the local community. Please watch this space as the programme will be published next month and will run over three days in August: 20th, 21st and 22nd. Naturally, it has been planned to celebrate National Bee Day.
Just last month Sussex Police very generously donated £500 towards project ‘Bees&Seas’. This will greatly help us prepare the new site and our bees in time for our big event in August. We are so very grateful to Ian for coordinating this. One of our beekeepers in training, Ian put us forward for this much needed grant.
Lancing and Sompting Lions have just confirmed this week that they are very kindly donating £1,000 toward out children’s beekeeping children course. This money will allow us to run a fully qualified bee keeping course for young people – with each child receiving a recognised bee qualification. We are incredibly excited about this latest news. If these young beekeeping courses are a success, we will use this initial pilot as a road map for supporting and funding further mentoring sessions for young people in the future.
All of this is in addition to a whole host of amazing business sponsors who have worked hard and donated generously to the development of our new eco pollinator hub.
Debs Butler, Director at We Are FoodPioneers is delighted with the support the Bees&Seas project has already attracted: “We can’t thank local business and the wider community enough for the ‘in kind’ and ‘financial’ contributions that have been pledged to this fantastic project which will see the site at Brooklands Park transformed for local people and wildlife”.
