| How to Volunteer for The Honey Bee Network
You may be a writer artist, small or big investor, entrepreneur, academic, school teacher, ecologist, food technologist; agricultural, veterinary, human or microbiological scientist, engineer, fabricator, student, a vendor on the street, shop keeper, householder, translator, government servant, corporate executive, lawyer, manager of an incubator, a start-up, or just a farmer, pastoralist etc. You may just be a curious individual without any idea as to how can you connect with the Network.
The Network always needs new leaders, just as it needs sincere followers. It is an ethical platform that tries to deal with people’s knowledge in a most sincere and transparent manner.
You can do many things and you can do them from anywhere:
You don’t have to be very clear about what you can do to begin with, but it must be clear whether you want to contribute voluntarily or as a paid intern, at SRISTI premises or from your own place, online or off line, or just want to spread the good word. It is possible that when you study the activities, participate in some, you begin to appreciate better which aspect of our work resonates with your spirit. Majority of what we have accomplished in India or 70-0 other countries, sporadically or continuously has been accomplished through volunteers.
We don't aim at enriching ourselves or our kins through the activities of the Network. We want to give maximum credit to the knowledge providers whose generosity when blended with institutional volunteers helped in creating the Network.
What can you do?
Translate: You can translate the content of different databases, case studies, research papers, reports and other outputs into regional/global languages to make it accessible to local communities.
Transform:You can transform local knowledge, ideas and traditional practices into value added products/services to help local communities move on a sustainable path; you can help in screening thousands of microbial cultures isolated from soil samples collected during shodhyatras and help develop value added products. The Benefits, if any, from them will go towards conservation of biodiversity in the regions from which the concerned samples were collected. You can characterise traditional nutritious foods, make posters, review literature etc.
You can Transform stories of innovators (technological, educational, institutional or cultural) into comics, posters, booklets, animation for children and adults;
Tweak: You can tweak many challenges posed at summerschool.sristi.org and help young students design better solutions, host students in harsh conditions to enable them to map local richness of material and non material resources and skills
Transfer: Lot of knowledge needs to be transferred from one creative community, school, lab, studio, house to another; cross-pollination is the essence of the Network. You can be the ‘bridge, broker or benevolent bania’ who cross-connect nodes and helps in creating knowledge network
Mentor: You can mentor budding start-up in sustainability and affordability space, help them connect with right partners, help expand the reach and resources of sif.sristi.org
Paint/illustrate: Draw or paint cover page for Honey Bee Newsletter, illustrate stories, help us find less popular folk stories that convey in a sublime manner about values of nature conservation and compassionate creativity
There are so many other ways volunteers can help trigger a node of the Network in respective region. Ideally, we should have a node in each district, school, college and each city/village of the world. We should spread the philosophy of the Network to scout/search, spread, and celebrate inclusive innovations and outstanding functional traditional knowledge; and identify or sense or make an inventory of the unmet social needs. These unmet needs will trigger next innovation revolution in the country. Gandhian values still have a place in our life. Frugality has to be a binding constraint on all our pursuits. There is no pride in doing things extravagantly.
You can be an active participant in making the world more creative, compassionate and collaborative. The Honey Bee Network needs all your energy, no matter what you do, where you are located. There is something that each one of you can contribute to the Network. We await your mails and tweets/posts eagerly…
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