Right now, bees are dying worldwide at an alarming rate. Why should you care? Because bees and other pollinators are an essential link in the food chain—our food chain.

The Bee Bold Alliance is a movement to help people attract and sustain pollinators in their home gardens, and at their place of work through habitat restoration and creation.

The Bee Bold Alliance blog will share stories that follow both the root causes for the disappearance of the bees and why it is so important to listen to the pollinators. Join us as we explore the diversity and abundance of our Pollinators of the world.

The Bee Bold Alliance is about helping people learn how to attract and sustain pollinators in their home gardens & at their place of work through habitat restoration and creation.

However we will not stop there, we are going to look deeper into the root cause of the disappearance of pollinators and discover modern solutions, that perhaps have previously been overlooked.

To find examples of a sustainable relationship with the earth, we will look to a regenerative ecology network that includes Traditional Ecology Knowledge (TEK). Incorporating the Indigenous place based wisdom gathered from around the world by those who develop and maintain a deep and ancestral connection to the land.

You too, are part of this solution, and I thank you for being here. Your support on this collaborative project is essential. Your participation will allow us to move forward for a bountiful future for all. If you are coffee drinker, make your coffee our Bee Bold Coffee and support pollinator protection in your local region every morning.

The Bee Bold Alliance came into focus in 2018, just after receiving a loud and clear message that it was “my time” be a steward of this land. Shortly after I received this message, Thanksgiving Coffee Company invited me to relaunch the Bee Bold project.

In revitalizing this campaign, what was once Bee Bold Mendocimo became the Bee Bold Alliance for Pollinator Protectors. The more I learned about my role in leading this campaign, the less I truly know. For example, now I understand it is not about being a “steward”, one who watches over the land, but more importantly one who actively gives to the land before one takes. To be full of gratitude for all we are given. To move through each day with honor and respect for the Earth that gives us every little thing that we need.

The Bee Bold Alliance is a reminder that you can give to the land you live on, to the land you do your business is on, and to the community you are part of. The vision is to build native food forest with Native People, with the seed savers, and to support the health of our new generations. The Bee Bold Alliance is about honoring the original care givers of these lands, and protecting the pollinators who allow us to grow the seeds of real food to nourish our bodies and our hearts.

As we develop this full spectrum ecology system for pollinator protection, we must include the practices of cultural ecology.

• Learn from the wisdom of our elders who remember and hold these stories of how we can adapt to our changing world.
• Revitalise the rich lineage of community song & dance as an important piece of the creation processes in our food system
• Remember and recreate connection to the spirit of life through our culture,
• How is sound health for our ecology manifested?

The Earth is full of abundance, the gifts of life are all around us, and all that we need to survive comes from this great planet Earth. How do we learn to live in harmony with the Earth and all its inhabitants? This is what I want to know, and I will take you through this journey of learning, as we travel many roads and look at many different tools that can be utilized in this work of rebalance, harmony, well being and sound health.

Here we are at the beginning of an emerging network for mutual support of our pollinator protectors: it will grow as we build it. Our World is as resilient as we make it. Let us find this new form of global coherence with the aid of one another. I hope you will join us on this journey. Become a pollinator protector with the growing Bee Bold Alliance here.

Follow the Evolution of the Bee Bold Alliance

2015: The 1st Bee Bold Advisory Committee

2016: Our 1st Bee Bold Event

2016: Fort Bragg becomes 1st Bee City USA in CA

2020: Introducing the Bee Bold Alliance

2020: The Way of the Bee Bold Alliance

2021: 4th World Bee Day 

2021: Live Feed- World Bee Day

2022: Expanding Our Story of a Growning Alliance

2022: Pomo Possibilities

2022: Night of Native Cinema

2023: Native Cinema 2023- Groundworks

2024: Native Cinema 2024

“Go to your fields and your gardens, and you shall learn that it is the pleasure of the bee to gather honey of the flower, But it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its honey to the bee. For to the bee a flower is a fountain of life, And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love, And to both, bee and flower, the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy.” Kahlil Gibran

There has been a lot of talk about pollinators in recent years, and how the declining populations of honeybees will affect food production. But have you ever wondered how it all started? When I began to write this, I had a rather broad understanding of pollination. However, the more I learned, the more questions I had. How did pollination come into being? Why is it so important to us now? Let’s take a deep dive into ancient history to learn a little more about the origins of pollination.

Pollination is believed to have begun around 130-150 million years ago. Basically, pollination is plant sex: the way plants spread and combine their genetic material to create new generations of plants. It is also essential to the production of fruit and seed crops that form the basis of our current food system. In the earliest forms of pollination, plants would scatter their pollen (male seed) to the wind and hope that a portion would land in the right spot on a female flower (stamen) and voila, there would be “chemistry”! However, this is an extremely unreliable way to reproduce. Although many plants still use this method, most have evolved into a primary relationship to collaborate with insects.

As early insects were flying around in search of food, they discovered how nutritious pollen was. Then several specialists decided to make pollen their main source and feed solely upon this nourishing golden dust of microspores. As the plants grew and thrived as a result of these relationships, they began to “sweeten the deal” by creating nectar for the services rendered. Flowers began to evolve bright colors to stand out and attract insects, distinguishing themselves from the green leaves and foliage that offered no sweet reward for the hard-working pollinators.

Millions of years have passed since the first flowers developed their pollination practice into the stunning displays we see today. This mutualistic relationship has changed the entire appearance of the earth, into the bright and colorful flowers and the vast variety of fruits and vegetables we all enjoy.

Learning the evolution of pollination from its ancient origins to the intricate and collaborative relationship that now occurs has been an inspiration to me. I hope the next time you receive a bouquet of flowers or taste the sweet juices of your favorite fruit, you think of the 130 million year journey it took to reach you.

A regenerative campaign from Thanksgiving Coffee to protect pollinators

The Magical and Miraculous Creation of Honey

The Way of the Bee Bold Alliance

Expanding Alliance: Native Cinema

Delicious Peace Coffee is produced in Uganda by 250 coffee farmers of Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths who work together in their newly reformed cooperative after the last one they belonged to was corrupted by their founder who took all the coops property and a portion of their financial resources. In 2016, after a decade of belonging to the original cooperative, Mirembe Kawomera, they parted ways from the original and perhaps the only Interfaith Cooperative in the world that was fully composed of Jews, Christians and Muslims. We at Thanksgiving Coffee spent from 2006 to 2016 happily buying their coffee and telling their Interfaith story. The story of how it all ended can be found in this 10 part series “A Trip to Africa”. What follows is their new story.

Interfaith work was not this cooperatives mission. But it became a necessary aspect of their economic survival as coffee farmers. Individually their farms were too small to produce export quantities where the value of their labor would be appreciated and the price level per pound would be related to the unique flavor of their coffee beans. Putting differences aside, they formed a new cooperative to continue their work together. They renamed the cooperative The Namanyonyi Community of Shalom Coffee Cooperative (NCSCC).

Their story of Interfaith cooperation is worth telling here in the United States. We need to fight the fear of diversity with love, kindness, and inspirational models like this one. If poor Coffee farmers in Uganda can bring together 250 farm families for economic benefit for all, that is an accomplishment worth telling. If they can do it, we can too!

On my periodic visits to Uganda. I notice an unexpected consequence of our support and of their integration. There is a kind of Peace in their community, a shift from the tentativeness and mistrust between people practicing different religions in the same small community. Having to work together brought a familiarity that was comforting to most and as a consequence, enjoyment in finding new friends, a diminishing of the fear of being different and the growing and newfound empathy for their Abrahamic Brothers and Sisters as similarity replaced difference and myths became exposed as ignorance. Interfaith work creates Peace and with Peace in a community, Social, Economic and Environmental Justice can prevail.

As noted, this group of farmers has a history. First founded in 2004 The Mirembe Kawomera Cooperative was honored by Tufts University with their most prestigious honor, the Jean Mayer Award for Interfaith work in 2008 (I have a video of Thanksgiving Coffee on stage as the Co-op receive the award, but it is still on tape). We had been their only buyer but we were selling their coffee to Mosques, Churches, Synagogues and Interfaith Councils with great success. By 2018 we were selling 30,000 pounds yearly and paying 4 times the local price they would have received from the local buyers in Uganda.

They had become a Fair Trade Certified Cooperative and had converted to 100% organic cultivation. The flavor was steadily improving and we felt that their 82 had the potential to become an 88. We were moving forward and the coffee was now beginning to be a part of the story as its flavor began to shine. But when the Cooperative members reorganized without their corrupt founder, they lost their hard-earned Certifications of Fair Trade and Organic. They are now in the process of becoming re-certified. Their cultivation practices remain the same.

In 2017 Thanksgiving Coffee contracted with The Communities of Shalom International Resource Center at Drew University for a year of intensive training for their new Board of Directors. It cost our company $6,000 but their story still needed to be told and with the internet now in full force, we knew we had the tools to bring the story to a much wider audience than before.

In October 2019 the Namanyonyi coffee farmers harvested their first crop as the new cooperative with its now trained Board of Directors in full charge. I had not yet tasted their 2019 crop for quality but I had a strong suspicion that it would be as good or slightly better than the 82 that was the score we gave our 2016 purchase. I didn’t think it was much of a risk because it was for them a second chance at creating a lasting relationship with a roaster who would tell their story and add value to their crop via the Interfaith model they had successfully accomplished together.

Photo: Co-op president proudly showing his Delicious Peace Coffee Package to the Chef at the Intercontinental Hotel in Kampala.

They were by now quite proud of who they were and how peaceful their small village was. When the coffee arrived at our Roastery in California we gathered in our tasting room and opened the first sack to view their raw, unroasted green beans. They were fresh smelling and blue-green in color. Their aromatics foretold a taste we were all anxious to experience. Jacob roasted a small sample which the next day, after the beans had rested a bit, we gathered around the cupping table to taste what was the first cup of the 360,000 cups that the 15,000 pounds would produce when it was brewed in peoples homes.

The flavors were every bit a reflection of the beautiful green-blue raw beans we inspected and roasted the day before. Lots of sweetness, fruity notes of mission figs, balanced with a nice soft lemony acidity, and a long wet finish. Lovely! We gave it an 86. It was their best score after almost fifteen years of working as a harmonious group of coffee farmers.

The 250 families that produce this coffee have a drinking water problem. Water systems are rare and most water for drinking and cooking is collected from “bore holes” loaded with dangerous bacteria. So boiling is the most common way to kill the bacteria. Even with this purifying procedure water-born diseases like Typhoid, Cholera, and diarrhea kills 50% of all children under 5 years old. Such death rates cause a great deal of emotional pain for the families and their community. We needed to do something about this otherwise the joy of cooperative success would be muted by poor health and death hanging over every one of the 250 families in the Cooperative.

Coincidentally or so it seemed, I received a communication from a woman who had been a Peace Corps Volunteer recently in Uganda. Kathy is a Civil Engineer. She told me of her work providing Clay Water Filters for homes in Uganda. She created a business in Kampala which manufactured water filters made out of local red clay and sawdust. After firing, the filters could remove, by simple gravity, 99.9% of all harmful bacteria making the water safe to drink. Their cost is $24.00 for a 20-liter system.

Calculating a $1.00 rebate to the coop for every pound Thanksgiving sells, we could raise enough money for 600 family water filters. Although there are only 250 families in the cooperative now, the prospect of receiving the filter free from the coop would help them strengthen their ties to the community they all live in and perhaps become well respected for their kindness and concern.

This water filter has multifaceted benefits;

• No wood needs be gathered from the forest to boil water , saving time and kitchen smoke pollution.
• Forests are not reduced to dry meadows
• Woman and girls spend less time hunting for, gathering, carrying, and transporting wood back to their homes
• Health improves, and the pain and fear of illness and loss of life diminishes
• Climate change is mitigated by preserving carbon sequestering trees.
• Money is not wasted on unnecessary purchases of charcoal, wood , medicines, and burials.

This is a work that is worthy. Everyone wins with this wonderful coffee. So here is your call to action. Take a risk on buying the first two packages. One roasted to a Medium Roast and a second to a darker Vienna Roast. A combo you can drink individually or blend together as you use them. Regardless of how you drink them, I guarantee you will find their flavor just wonderfully satisfying.

The best coffee is grown the traditional way— slowly, under a canopy of shade from taller native hardwood trees. Shade-grown coffees are carefully tended, harvested, and processed by people who know and love coffee, and who depend on it for their livelihoods.

Traditional shade-grown coffee really is a win for everyone: amazing coffee flavors, a fair wage for the coffee farmers’ hard work, and a lush natural habitat for migratory birds. So much good comes from a just cup of coffee.

By 1996, the United States forests had run out of hardwoods such as oak, ash, maple, cherry, and all the wild fruit and nut trees. These are important woods used in furniture making, home building, veneers for plywood, doors, window frames and a host of other minor but important uses.

The timber industry needed another source of hardwood, so they targeted the temperate rainforests where coffee was grown. The coffee tree is a shade loving plant that withers in the sun and needs shade to be a healthy producer of the coffee fruit. Mahogany and a dozen other hardwood varieties were there for the loggers if only they could convince coffee farmers to cut down their trees.

The destruction of these native hardwood forests is a long story of deception. Governments, in collaboration with multinational corporations, set out to convince farmers to grow their coffee in the sun, claiming that yields would increase and incomes would rise.

Without the leaf litter from the big hardwood trees to fertilize the soil every year coffee trees at Nicaragua Coffee Farms would need oil-based fertilizers. This is how the petrochemical companies became involved. Now with more sunlight reaching the ground, weed killers would become essential. This is how herbicide producer Monsanto became involved. Without the forest habitat for migratory songbirds, natural pest controls were lost. This is how the need for chemical pesticides became essential.

The big chemical companies found new markets and the timber companies gained new inventories of almost unlimited, inexpensive hardwoods. The coffee farmers paid for all this with higher costs, lower quality coffee, toxins entering the water supply, and a 90% loss of biodiversity on their farms.

Preserving these precious jungle forests not only protects biodiversity, but it’s also our greatest asset in mitigating the effects of climate change.

The Smithsonian’s Bird Friendly® certification is the most rigorous environmental certification possible for coffee, and the only one that justifies the use of the much-abused term “shade-grown.”
Based on years of scientific research, the SMBC has developed strict criteria for evaluating shade coffee farms. An independent, third-party inspector determines whether a farm meets these criteria or not. Only those farms that also meet organic certification standards are eligible to be certified Bird Friendly®.

Protect biodiversity, with your morning Cup

Thanksgiving Coffee’s Upsetter Espresso has been named a Winner of the 2019 Good Food Awards!

Each January, the Good Food Foundation organizes a three-day weekend to meet, celebrate, taste and buy from the nearly 200 Good Food Winners. The awarded products top the charts in a blind tasting and meet the environmental and social responsibility standards of the Good Food Awards. Each year, over 2,000 entries from all 50 states are submitted.

The coffees are , so neither the volunteers nor the judges have any indication of what coffees are presented. Judges are broken up into groups, each team tasting up to 8 different flights of coffee. After the first round – which this year featured over 170 submissions – only 50 coffees move on. These represent the 10 highest scoring coffees from each region of the US: East, West, North, South, and Central. The finalists are evaluated again and the top two in each region become Good Food Awards winners.

Thanks to you, our customers, for knowing that a great cup of coffee comes from the heart, just as much as it comes from the coffee beans. Not Just A Cup, But A Just Cup