Daniel Rubins is a musician and heartivist. He founded Hear Your Song, a non-profit organization that empowers children and teens with serious illnesses to make their voices heard through collaborative songwriting. It all started with a special school experience and a...

Poli Sotomayor is a Mexican activist, social media influencer, singer, writer and member of our global family of grassroots volunteer leaders. We first met Poli and learned of her project, Polifacética, in 2017. When Tessa Graham, then our Animal Advocacy Coordinator...

Active citizenship, community empowerment and volunteer experiences: how three Italian women are seeding the change and making responsible tourism bloom!The Pollination Project community is made of volunteer grassroots leaders who put their time and energy in service...

There are people who are born with a light inside, capable of illuminating the path of those who are lost in the labyrinth of life and cannot find a way out. Paul Talliard was one of these rare gems of humanity; a man who dedicated his life to helping those who had...

“Bree is a rooster, but he is an intelligent, feeling Being that craves love and peace, just like all of us. Most children grow up loving animals. My hope is that by meeting Bree and learning more about compassionate food systems, children can learn to reflect their...

This week, we want to use this space to amplify changemakers whose work has special relevance to Black History Month. Here are five changemakers in The Pollination Project community whose work educates, reframes, and uplifts historical Black voices. We encourage you...

“An enemy is one whose story we have not heard.”  These inspiring words from a recent application capture the spirit of an exciting new effort blossoming here at The Pollination Project. This week’s “Changemaker of the Week” is not about just one person, but a group...

Eric and Sheryl Kolb lost Sheryl’s grandmother, Olive, to Alzheimer’s in 2006. Just two years later, Sheryl’s mother Trish began having trouble remembering words and recognizing familiar objects. For the next twelve years, the family went through all the joy, pain and...

In the midst of so much chaos and confusion that descended on America’s capitol last week, it brings us hope to know that The Pollination Project’s spirit of peace and kindness was also present on that day.  In 2017, Mary Liepold and Eli McCarthy received seed funding...

One day several years ago, photographer and animal activist Tamara Blazquez Haik was walking home when she came across a poisoned opossum lying dead on the sidewalk. Many people might have kept walking and not given this a second thought, but Tamara couldn’t help but...

Dorcas Apoore grew up in Northern Ghana, in a remote village so small that it isn’t even on a map. Her mother was married at a young age and never got to finish school, a cycle that Dorcas saw repeated for a great many girls in her village. Most often, this is an...

When she became pregnant at 18, Maria del Mar Jaramillo felt her dreams come crashing down around her. She spent her pregnancy full of worry, wondering if the life she had envisioned for herself would still be possible. With the loving support of her husband and...

In a shed in downtown Merced, California, there is a random refrigerator overflowing with an ever-changing bounty of persimmons, lettuce, celery, and other locally sourced whole fruits and vegetables. Everything in the fridge is free; twenty-four hours a day, anyone can visit to pick up what they might need. “The People’s Fridge” is a volunteer labor of love, organized by Erin Meyer and Steve Roussos.

Growing up, Jenna Bardroff’s best friend was a potbellied pig named Arnie. When she made the connection between what her parents were putting on her plate and her love for Arnie, she became a vegetarian at the age of five. She started college at the age of fourteen,...

Sohibjamol Rakamova is an unlikely chess champion. In her native Tajikistan, chess is a game of status and nobility. Many children are enrolled in chess training at the same time they go to nursery school, but this wasn’t the case for Sohibjamol. She grew up in the...

Nearly ten years ago, Bethany Fancher packed her bags and flew to Hyderabad, India, and then continued into the countryside to the village of Chandrakal. She didn’t know what to expect; only that the orphanage where she had agreed to teach art was home to about sixty...

This is a story of brotherhood. Raoul Vecchio is an architect and engineer. One day in his native Italy, Raoul had a chance encounter with an artist named Jali Diabate. As they talked, a synergy emerged that would meaningfully shape both their lives. Jali is part of...

When the pandemic came, some people drank about it, some people wrote about it — and some people planted potatoes about it. In the heart of South San José, next to a housing project for low-income seniors, is a small community garden on land belonging to St. Stephen’s...

Before she was a banker, Tiffany Kirk was an elementary school teacher. She never really stopped being an educator, but her classroom looks very different today. These days, Tiffany spends a lot of her free time teaching financial literacy in the community. Her work...

Earlier this year, Laura Lavigne awoke from a vivid dream about contagious red hearts. In the dream, anyone who received a red heart was filled with a deep sense of peace. The hearts were spreading quickly throughout the world. This vision of something that “went...

Fontoh Desmond Abinwi did not grow up in a home or country that had great material wealth, yet he knew that the rich biodiversity in his native Cameroon was something much more valuable. Cameroon is home to plants and animals seen nowhere else in the world; the black...

Jessica Gonzalez Castro is a reader. One book in particular has shaped the trajectory of her life. After reading “Animal Liberation” by Peter Singer, Jessica was moved to learn how she could be a more effective activist for animal rights. So it was with great...

Racheal Inegbedion was visiting a home for people with disabilities when she saw something that changed her life. “When someone visits, the residents sing a welcome song and share in a prayer with their guests,” remembers Racheal. “One of the young women, who had a...

The evening of August 4th was like any other for Beirut-based Malak Yacout. Then, buildings around her began to shake, pink smoke filled the sky, and a deafening explosion felt more than 270 kilometers away rocked the city. Instantly, 300,000 people became homeless,...

One day, Chimwemwe Chitambala heard a knock on her door. She was living in a student hostel, studying business and economics at the University of Zambia. Chimwemwe opened the door, and found a woman selling fruits and vegetables. These traders, known as “UNZA Veg” in...

On a warm night in late July, Sarah Reidenbach and Kate Kuzminski got into “Clifford,” their big red mobile veterinary unit, and headed to the parking lot of a hotel in Sonoma County. It was long past office hours for most professionals, but Sarah and Kate aren’t...

From Darel Scott’s desire to make both nature and the environmental movement more inclusive, Earth in Color was born. Earth in Color started as an art festival on a farm to celebrate people of color and their cultural connections to the natural world. That day under the spring sun—filled with art, food, music, and connection—highlighted the importance of people of color being able to see themselves through this lens of health and sustainability.

Like many of us, Miracle Adesina watched the COVID-19 pandemic spread through the lens of social media. As a healthcare professional, what he saw coming through his social feeds gave him great cause for concern. Part of the problem, Miracle felt, was that critical health messages were not available in many of the 70+ indigenous languages throughout Africa. The Pollination Project supported Miracle’s translation project with a seed grant.

Lucas Akol’s son, who has sickle cell disease, inspired him to become a community educator and support for other families. During COVID-19, Lucas is providing these at-risk children and families with food and hygiene supplies to stay safe.

In some ways, the story of the Minnesota Black Community Project is a tale of two men named Walter Scott. Only one of them has had their story told.

For Eric Miller, the path to a young person’s potential runs through the yard of a neighbor in need. “My mother’s name was Deloris Miller. She was a special ed teacher who always said every young person had the capacity to learn, but we all learn through different...

Jennifer Rae Myers learned the power of words from her father, Raymond Banks. A writer himself, Raymond raised Jennifer to value the art of communication. He took her to the library after school, encouraged her to read, and showed her through example how to advocate for historically disadvantaged people through language. In third grade, her essay on Harriet Tubman won a writing contest on American heroes, a moment she still recalls as the point in which she realized the gift her father’s encouragement had offered her.

The force that moves me is compassion,” said Gelli, a TPP changemaker whose sanctuary—which, in part, rescues domestic animals who were abandoned because their owners feared they could carry the coronavirus–was awarded funding by TPP’s COVID-19 Rapid Response Fund. “I cannot see any living thing suffering. I cannot. I’m not able to pass by if I see someone or an animal suffering.

She only had enough food left to feed her family for one week. This 35-year-old widowed woman, let’s call her Amara, and her family live in Dharavi, India. You may know Dharavi—it was the slum featured in the movie “Slumdog Millionaire.” This woman lost her husband due to alcoholism a few years back, and since then she has had full responsibility for the caregiving and support of her three children.

Ghosh knew he had the opportunity to use his specialized knowledge to help the communities he had worked with for so long. His ingenious plan? Using the WHO’s gold standard recipe, he created his own hand sanitizer by mobilizing the youth in the Kolkata slums to help him.

Cavanaugh Bell has spent the last two years giving back to his community of Gaithersburg, Maryland, a significant amount of time for anyone, but even more so when you consider his age–which is 7. You read that right. Bell first began leading a host of care pack initiatives to help the homeless in his community when he was just 5 years old.

But then, once again, the unthinkable happened—a pandemic swept through the nation, with California being one of the hardest hit states. All of a sudden, Lowrey was thrust again into emergency mode. “[Our family, friends, and neighbors] have survived the nightmare of the fire and had just gotten back to work. They were finally feeling hopeful again … and then COVID-19 happened. We are now hit with a second disaster before we have recovered from the first.”

When the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world, Sam Suchin knew he had to do something. “In the past few weeks, people all over the world have started to brainstorm creative solutions to keep people safe during the outbreak,” says Suchin. “Hope3D has joined the movement.” Enter Project Shield: a project which aims to crowdsource 3D printed face shields for healthcare workers.