Brief description of the organisation/initiative
The Beehive Community is a social enterprise that offers workshops, seminars, and self-improvement retreats to individuals and groups. The main goal of Beehive is to enhance social change through personal development. The organisation promotes a culture of care while improving well-being.
Beehive’s vision for social change is directly related to liberating people from personal and social constraints so that they can act to their full potential, freely, creatively, and with a high level of awareness.
Beehive creates the conditions for all members of its community to be empowered and contribute positively to the effort to move to a society based on respect, mutual support, equal opportunities, and rights for all.
Challenge overview
The Covid-19 pandemic triggered the need to create a new, online version of all Beehive’s seminars. In the beginning, this new way of organising seminars seemed like a difficult task, but staff members learned new tools and developed new skills to adapt to the changes.
In the end, Beehive was able to create high-quality webinar versions of all of Beehive’s seminars, allowing connecting with people living abroad or in other cities to reach a global audience and a bigger pool of participants. After this experience, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Beehive’s staff decided to continue offering web seminars and workshops as a permanent service.
Establishment of the organisation/initiative/enterprise
The organisation has a legal form starting from 2020. The Beehive community operates under social-cooperative status.
Management structure and governance
The Beehive Community is a social enterprise. It consists of five equal members who work as volunteers and are legally and financially responsible for the well-being and the flourishing of the social cooperative.
In the broader circle, a community of people, the bees, joins the community-building events.
The legal representative of the organisation is elected by a resolution of all members. Currently, the legal representative of the Beehive community is Mrs Christina Papadopoulou. All the decisions inside the organisation are taken horizontally by the whole staff in a weekly assembly, using the method of sociocracy for decision-making and nonviolent communication as the way to communicate.
Principles of work, objectives and activities
The main goal is to enhance social change through personal development. Promoting the culture of care and trying to improve well-being, Beehive targets social change and the liberation of people from personal and social constraints. To succeed, Beehive arranges activities for personal improvements, such as workshops for effective communication, improvisational theatre, Montessori webinars, etc.
Target groups
The target group depends on the specific project. Beehive staff organise their activities with an inclusive approach and offers actions for all age groups.
Innovation
The concept of culture of care is particularly innovative. All activities organised by the Beehive community seek to foster respect, mutual support, equal opportunities, and rights for all for the common good in society. Even though this concept is very new and not developed, it has a positive impact on the individual and community level.
Impact and Evaluation
The best tool to evaluate the impact of the Beehive community is the number of participants involved in different activities. This is evident through the webinars, which attendance during and after the Covid increased the visibility of the organisation and its work. The Beehive community is now well-known on a local level. It is being more and more able to impact people’s life.
Recommendations
While working in the social field, it is important to give the “voice” to the community members, involved them whenever possible in the decision-making process, and adapt the workshops, seminars and other services based on their needs. The primary key to success is providing services and activities that people need.
Lessons Learned
It is important to be flexible and adapt to all the changes. Entrepreneurship is highly demanding, and finding the tools and methods to adapt the services in different contexts without losing the primary idea and goal, is the most important. The Covid-19 pandemic has proven that innovative thinking and the ability to take risks and adapt to new circumstances are the most dominant features in the field of entrepreneurship.
References
The Beehive community website.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.