Climate Action NOW !!!

This page is about how to run your own Bee Squared campaign. In Hazlemere, we’ve been runnign these since 2021, and we’ve learnt a few things. We want Bee Squared to cover the globe, so we encourage you to read and use the hints, tips, and documents that we share to help you.

If you have any tips or comments that could help us, please email hazlemere.climate@gmail.com.

So, what have we learnt?

  • It’s better to learn from someone else, than to learn from your mistakes.
  • There are plenty of people in your neighbourhood that are keen to help.
  • It’s difficult to find, recruit, and retain volunteers
  • There’s more than one way to skin a cat:
    • Distribution Model: Deliver seed into the letterbox of houses in your area:
      • Certainly the most wasteful system, as a lot of households will not be able or willing to engage with the scheme
      • Everybody gets to know about the programme, understand the objectives, and the problems you’re trying to address
    • Collection Model: Set up locations (eg. shops, doorsteps, churches), where people can collect seeds.
      • Only people that are motivated to help will collect seeds.
      • Advertising and Engaagement are very difficult.
      • How do you promote the concept, and get people to engage?
  • We’ll try to pass on what we’ve learnt so far.

This page was created in Feb 2023, and it’s evolving. Please bear with us, whilst e develop the page.

Checklists

Checklists are incredibly important. You’re running a project, and any Project Manager will tell you that “it’s easier to follow a checklist, than to invent something new“.

In time, we’ll create some dedicated checklists, but for now, they’re just lists on this web page. Click the following tabs, to understand what we’ve learnt:

Stage 1: Buiding an Eco Team and Community

VERY DIFFICULT – How do you find people that think the same way you do?

You need to decide what sort of group you want to create. Honestly, in Hazlemere we’re still trying to figure this one out, ourselves !! Usually there is a small hard-core of people that attend all the meetings, and a wider group of loose attachments that come and go.

Bee Squared is quite a useful Rallying Call for people to gather behind.

Stage 2: Finding Supporters and Volunteers

In Hazlemere, we created a Facebook group and waited for people to join.

There are other, probably successful methods:

  • Religion: The world’s Top-6 Religions are Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Judaism. Each religion has an ecological arm that you can engage with:
    • Do you have supporters that can advertise and promote Bee Squared within these local communities?
    • Christianity
      • The Anglican Church is promoting Eco-Church
      • The Catholic church has Eco Catholic
      • There is a substantial mutual benefit for both Church and Bee Squared in getting involved.
      • How can you leverage publicity and volunteers from these groups within your church?
        • Who leads these groups?
        • What publications can you advertise in?
        • Where (meetings) can you suggest that people help you?
    • Islam
    • Hinduism
    • Buddhism
    • Sikhism
    • Judaism.
  • Non-Religeous Groups include:
    • Find Social groups that you could work with…
    • The list of these groups is almost endless. Here are some suggestions to start with:
    • Womens Institute
    • Probus
    • Lions
    • Rotary / Roteract
    • Sports and Social Groups
    • Bridge Clubs
    • Scouts, Guides, Brownies, Cubs, etc.

You just need to find a contact in a group that is prepared to share your message. Really, you just need a venue, where you can

  • stand up,
  • tell people what you’re trying to achieve

…the volunteers will come.

Stage 3: Getting Sponsorship

Q: How much sponsorship do you need?

A: Somewhere between £1,500 – £2,500, depending on lots of factors.

The bad news is that in order to get sponsorship, you need to ask. This doesn’t come easy to most of us. However, with some help, you can maximise your investment of time.

  • Who will benefit from a relationship with Bee Squared. In Hazlemere, our main sponsor has been an Estate Agent.
    • They get their name on our leaflet
    • The leaflet goes in each letterbox
    • Relatively little effort on their side
    • Immediate brownie points as good-eggs !!
  • Probably needs to be an organistion that wants to expand awareness
  • Ideally, organisations that want to promote their ecological credentials:
    • Solar Panel installers
    • Waste treatment sites
    • County Councils & Parish Councils

Stage 4: Preparation

This is quite a simple process, really

  • Figure out how many packets you will need:
    • How many houses in your area?
    • How many people do you hope will collect your seeds
  • Buy Seeds
    • How much will you need: We work on 4g per envelope, which is approximately one rounded teaspoon (NOT “heaped“). If you have some very accurate scales, you should be able to weigh, and visualise what 4g looks like.
  • Buy Envelopes
    • It was important to use envelopes that the seeds don’t leak out of, or stick to.
    • We used:
      Envelopes.co.uk
      Envelopes Ltd
      Unit A2
      Knaves Beech Industrial Estate
      Loudwater
      Buckinghamshire
      HP10 9QY

      Phone: +44 (0)1628 810 000
      Contact: Anna Antony 
  • Create Instructions for your seeds – How to plant
    • We looked at printing the instructions directly on the envelopes, but this proved to be prohibitively expensive.
    • Instead, we purchased some laser labels from ebay that fitted our envelopes
      • 63.2mm x 75mm
      • 12 labels per page (4 rows x 3 columns) gives an ideal perspective
    • Created a template, in Microsoft Word (downloadable here)
    • Made certain that the template fittted the label
      • Print the template to a sheet of plain paper
      • To check your template matches your labels:
        • Hold the printed template over the labels, in front of a bright light
    • Asked the Parish Council to print the labels
      • They probably have a better printer than any of your volunteers
      • Use a Laser Printer, to avoid rain making ink-jet labels run, unreadably
  • Create an accompanying leaflet

Stage 5: Packaging Seeds

  • Create the Package, by bringing together the paperwork, and the seeds.
    • Several volunteers got together one Saturday, in a line:
      • Volunteer 1 picks an envelope, and holds it open for Volunteer 2
      • Volunteer 2 puts 5g of seeds (one slightly rounded teaspoonfull) into each envelope.
      • Volunteer 1 passes the envelope to Volunteer 3
      • Volunteer 3 uses a wet sponge to moiten and seal the envelope, thn passes it to Volunteer 4
      • Volunteer 4 applies the label of instructions to the envelope, then passes it to Volunteer 5
      • Volunteer 5 shakes the seeds to the bottom of the envelope, then staples the leaflet to the envelope, and puts the package in a bag for delivery. Ideally, we have 50 deliverables per bag, so that it’s easier to deliver the seeds.
    • We found that 5 volunteers can create about XXXX packages per hour

Stage 6: Delvering Seeds

There are two methods for seed distribution:

  • Delivering seeds to each letterbox
    • Arguably, this is the easiest to manage
      • Decide how to partition the streets for delivery
        • In Hazlemere, we used Google maps and Postcodes
        • Each Postcode is designed so that the postman takes approximatey the same time to deliver to the postcode. This is extremely important when asking volunteers to work a route.
        • Each volunteer is allocated a unique set of postcodes, depending on how many volunteer you have, thus each volunteer will be walking roughly the same distance.
        • Start with Streetlist to find the number of Postcode Units in your locality (you may have to use several localities to cover your area – eg. adjacent villages)
          The StreetList introductory web page
        • Enter your localty to Streetlist. Type in your Postcode Sector (eg. HP10 6)
          Image of StreetList Potscode Sector view
          Click each Postcode Sector, to find out how many Postcode Units there are in the Postcode Sector.
        • Streetlist will tell you how many Postcode Units there are in your postcode Sector. If you’re lucky, your area will match your Postcode sector. If youre unlucky, use https://parallel.co.uk/postcodes (see later) to confirm the number of Postal Units.
          Image of StreetList detail for a Postcode Sector
        • Simply add together the numbers of Postcode Units in your area, then divide the total number of Postcode Units by the number Volunteers, and you will have rougly equivalent work plans/delivery areas for each Volunteer.
        • Next, visit https://parallel.co.uk/postcodes, type in your locality, and paralel will show a heat-map. Zoom in, until you can see individual postcodes (red dots). eg: https://parallel.co.uk/postcodes/#16/51.649509/-0.711073
          Street Map showing postcodes. Frm Parallel.co.uk
        • If your area is very confused, you may need to count the number of red dots in the next step, to find the number of Postal Units, then divide the number of dots by the number of volunteers.
        • Now, you can simply allocate the required number of adjacent postcodes to each volunteer, and potentially, print a map for them, highlighting their area with a pen.
    • Arrange volunteers to deliver to addresses
    • Give out bags of seeds
    • Wait for the volunteers to deliver the seeds
  • Providing Collection Points, where the public can visit to obtains seeds.
    • This approach turns out to be more difficult
    • Find organisations that will act as Collection Points
    • Ensure that they have a steady supply of sufficient packages, for the duration of your programme
    • Advertise, and keep advertising
    • Make sure that Collection Points don’t run dry of seeds

Stage 7: Demonstrating Success

Hazlemere created a website for use by any ecological group. You can:

  • Join our website
  • Just use our mapping tool
  • Or do your own thing entirely.

It’s up to you. The important thing is Bees

Do you need a website:

Websites, and the skills to run websites are not very widespread. We suspect that groups spend an inordinate amount of time and effort managing websites, so we’re trying to help…

https://ClimateActionNow.uk provides a WordPress framework that Eco groups can use for simple (and potentially complex) websites, at zero cost (so far).  The hosting costs (c. £90/year) have, so far, been managed to be relatively inexpensive, and have been supported by voluntary donations, voluntary effort, and last year the hosting was paid for by the Hazlemere Bee Squared project.

Currently there are 3 groups using the site and their own sub-site, each with their own style.

The Bee Squared maps and data-entry facilities sit under the top-level ClimateActionNow.uk page.  You could easily link or refer to this page from your own website, or you could have some pages on ClimateActionNow.uk and link to the maps from those pages.

I suggest that you take a look at ClimateActionNow.uk and see how you want to play it.

Do you just want to map your Bee Squares:

Bee Squared projects seem to work in one of two ways (both are supported):

  1. Eco Group puts seeds and leaflet into each house’s letterbox
  2. Eco Group sets up collection points, and invite residents to collect seeds.

In both cases, the resident can type their postcode into the website, and they get a bee-icon on the map outside their house.

ClimateActionNow.uk/bee-squares is map of the seeds that have been planted. There are web pages to:

  • Enter your planting details (and optionally register your interest in helping out)
  • Administering the map for a group that wants to use it (catchment areas, distribution points, etc).
  • Displaying the map, which includes some other tools:
    • Select the year that the map shows (default is the current year)
    • Find your nearest Eco Group and Collection point.

There is a new map each year, and we retain old maps to see how we progress.

The map supports two managed types of usage:

  • Distrbution method: Seeds delivered to letterboxes
  • Collection method: Seeds collected by planters from central locations
  • It also supports people simply adding their locations. No administration, but peope won’t be able to find collection points, etc.
How to use the map

The intention is that the map is centered on the user’s location, but frankly, we’ve not tested that thoroughly because the default location is High Wycombe.  If it’s broken now, it will be pretty easy to fix 🙂

The map also retains Bee-Squares from previous years, and there is a dropdown selector to look at maps from previous years.

Setup just needs a Bee-Administrator to create your Eco Group, decide which electoral wards the group covers, and create each Collection Point or Distribution Hub.  This is all done on the ClimateActionNow.uk website. We might support a purely postcode operated scheme at some point, but our origin is Parish Council Areas, so that’s how it’s organised at the moment. Internally, we use Postcode Districts, so it would be quite easy to implement…we just haven’t done it yet.

Let us know how you get on, or if you would like to know anything more: hazlemere.climate@gmail.com

Welcome onboard