October 21, 2024

Hurricane Helene has left many in Haywood County, WNC without homes, disconnected from their loved ones, and overwhelmed with grief. Our towns and hearts have been shattered, but through this heartache, the light too finds its way in.

Though we are a small grassroots organization, our role is critical in empowering people with well-being and healing practices and holding safe and sacred spaces for listening, trauma recovery, and resilience-building.

Our compassionate services – Healing with Art, Mindful Movement Qigong, and Nature Walks – serve as a platform for empowerment, compassionate connection, healing, and soulful expression for everyone in our community, especially for trauma survivors, people struggling with health challenges, and communities in need. The Healing Hive is a place of belonging where people from all paths of life connect heart to heart, and learn to release stress, heal trauma, and rekindle joy and gratitude.

Please join us in continuing to uplift and heal our communities by making a one-time donation or a monthly gift.

A contribution of any amount ensures that we have the resources to offer compassionate support, art therapy, and healing services in a safe and inclusive space.

Thank you for your loving kindness and generosity. Your donation keeps our community services accessible to all and free for everyone in need.

Together, we empower our communities to recover, heal, and flourish.

With love and gratitude,

Marga Fripp ❤️🐝

co-founder & Chief Pollinator of Good

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June 15, 2023

Many of you know of my decades-long efforts in social change work, from promoting successful legislation to protect domestic violence survivors in Romania in the late 90's, to empowering immigrant women and low-income communities in the Greater Washington DC Metro Area and across the world.

Together with my visionary daughter, Geanina Fripp Emerson - a changemaker in her own right, we started a 501(c)3 nonprofit in 2022 to promote mental wellness, compassionate connection, and social healing through the power of arts, movement and restorative mind-body practices.

Inspired by bees and all the good they bring to the world, we named the organization, The Pollinators Foundation.

Like bees in a hive, each one of us contributes to the well-being of the whole. No bee alone can keep the colony thriving, nor the bee can survive without its hive. To fully flourish we need each other, working in unity, serving the highest good of all.

In a time when across our country, 1 in 5 adults experience mental illness each year, 1 in 6 youth ages 6-17 experience a mental health disorder, and suicide is the 2nd leading cause of death among people ages 10-14, we must compassionately respond to help each other heal and thrive again.

Both Geanina and I have firsthand experience with the traumatic effects of mental health challenges through friends and family members whom we care for. Many of us suffer in silence when our loved ones are hurting. We feel alone and ashamed to ask for support, afraid of being judged.

More than half of people with mental illness don’t receive help for their disorders. Stigma, prejudice, and discrimination prevent them from seeking treatment or support.

In rural communities, like the place where we live, people are more susceptible to the stigma of needing mental healthcare as they fear judgment from their neighbors, co-workers, or friends. Additional factors such as the affordability of paying for services also weigh in.

Mental wellness services and support should not be difficult to access or unaffordable. As a society, we tend to do better at crisis response than at proactively building up resiliency and well-being.

But we can change this, together.

We all are born with innate abilities to create and make meaning out of our lived experiences. We paint, write, tell stories and move our bodies as a way to process emotions and reconnect to nature, and to each other.

What if we were to create a beloved community, a safe space where everyone matters, and our collective pain, grief, and losses become the pollen that nourishes the garden of life?

And what if in all this, we mix the rich nectar of creativity and belonging? Could the honeycomb then fill with the sweetness of love and the holiness of caring for each other?

I invite you all with us on this journey of making honey out of the heavy pollen of life. As the wise poet, Rumi puts it “Let everything happen to you/ Beauty and terror/ Just keep going/ No feeling is final.”

Join us on this quest as a Pollinator of Good by making a tax-deductible donation. All funds support our community mental wellness work and keep our Healing Arts Hive at Folkmoot open, Qigong classes, community walks and expressive arts group, and one-on-one workshops affordable to all and free of charge for those in need.

Please share this with your friends and come along to pollinate with us more joy, mental wellness, and social healing.

Together, we humanize the mental health conversation, end stigma and discrimination, and build a kind, healthy, and more vibrant world for all.

Thank you so much for being part of this urgent work.

With love and gratitude,

Marga & Geanina 🙏🏽❤️🐝

Bee a Pollinator of Hope and Healing!

By THE POLLINATORS FOUNDATION

Bee a Pollinator of Hope and Healing!