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Important Milestones Thanks to You.

Fri, 12/17/2010 - 05:19 — Gretchen Lebuhn

Dear Great Sunflower Project member,

Thanks to your help, The Great Sunflower Project reached some important milestones this year.

  • We now have over 90,000 members and are looking forward to having 100,000th member join us this spring.
  • We produced and posted on the website our first map of results and shared our first findings in our newsletter.
  • We hired an outreach director and are developing new outreach materials for both kids and adults.
  • We have had both Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts use the Great Sunflower Project to reach new levels and badges.
  • We partnered with several Master Gardening groups and Garden Clubs to collect data and donated enough seeds for every student in a school in New York to grow their own sunflowers over the summer and for a group of older adults living in a care facility in South Carolina to collect data there.

All of this has happened because you have supported us through calendar sales, seed purchases, donations and your time collecting data. Thank you.

I would like you to imagine how powerful this project will be if we can make what we are learning available to everyone. You could go to our web site and find out whether your yard is doing well or poorly relative to others in your area. If you are in a city, you could use the data we are collecting to argue for more green and garden spaces. Schools could continue to learn about their “bees per hour” rates in their gardens and compare them to those of the local community, their state and the continent. Students could create their own hypotheses and test them using our data.

“DO BEES LEAVE FOOTPRINTS?”

Two years ago, a school in St. Petersburg Florida joined the project and the kids sent us in a set of questions. Our favorite was “do bees leave footprints?” which gave us the opportunity to share recent research that suggests that bees can leave behind scents that deter other bees from visiting flowers. It is this type of partnership with our participants that we hope to develop over the next three years. While you may not realize it, by thinking about the pollinators in your garden and collecting data, you have become a scientist. We would like to share the joy of exploring the results and asking your own questions with all of you.

To that end, our two new goals for this upcoming year are to revise and invigorate the website and to continue to develop some new partnerships with all of you through outreach. We would also like to continue to give seeds for free to school and home-schooling groups and those who can’t afford to buy their own. Will you help us meet our goals?

There are several levels to how you can help and we appreciate your support. Here are some examples of the impact of your gift.

  • $25 gift will purchase seeds and outreach materials for a school garden
  • $50 gift will give individual students in budget strapped classroom enough seeds to take home and participate over the summer
  • $500 gift will allow us to send our Outreach Director to train Garden groups in becoming “citizen scientists”
  • $1000 gift will allow us to create an interactive map on the website.

We know these are difficult financial times and even a small bit does help. If you can support us, you can write a check to the Great Sunflower Project and send it to Great Sunflower Project, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave, San Francisco, CA 94132 or donate online here (If you use a credit card, look to the lower left corner to avoid paypal.)

The Great Sunflower Project reaches an extraordinary diversity of people from farmers to master gardeners to school kids and closing the loop from simply learning about pollinators to asking and answering questions about how to create pollinator friendly communities will help all of us. Your gift will have a significant impact on the ability of participants to become ambassadors. Thank you so much for partnering with us and best wishes for the New Year.

Sincerely,

Gretchen

Gretchen LeBuhn
Executive Director

P.S. Watch your calendars this spring and plan to join us for our first Pollinator Data Day. We hope to have all of you out in the garden discovering more about bees.