Huneebee Project photo
A beekeeping project that trains New Haven teens how to install and maintain hives and then develop honey-based products has landed an annual local “Unsung Heroes” award from the Morris and Irmgard Wessel Fund.
The local philanthropy made that announcement in an email press release Tuesday morning.
The fund’s David Wessel wrote that the Huneebee Project, founded by clinical social worker Sarah Taylor in 2018, has won the Unsung Heroes Award for 2021.
Click here to read a recent profile of the project in the New Haven Arts Paper, and see below for the full email press release.
Huneebee Project Wins Wessel Fund’s Unsung Heroes Award
The Morris and Irmgard Wessel Fund said that its Unsung Heroes Award for 2021 will go to the Huneebee Project, which offers skills training and jobs to New Haven teenagers through the craft of beekeeping.
The Project was founded in 2018 by Sarah J. Taylor, a Madison native who is clinical social worker at the Yale Child Study Center’s Intensive In-home Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Service project.
Taylor was searching for a social enterprise that employed young people, particularly those who are in foster care or about to age out of foster care, and stumbled on bee-keeping through her interest in making beeswax candles. After meeting several beekeepers, she says, “I was just hooked by the way they talked about bees and cared for their bees. I haven’t come across a beekeeper who doesn’t describe beekeeping as a form of therapy or spiritual practice.”
The Huneebee Project trains five or six teenagers in each annual four-month cohort who install beehives placed in gardens throughout the city. Youth go on to become Project employees, positions that include maintaining the hives, developing and marketing honey-based products, and managing community generated hive sponsorships. The Project sells honey harvested from its bees and beeswax candles from the wax cappings of the honey frames.
The Unsung Heroes Award was created in 1993 and is funded by friends and admirers of the late Morris Wessel, a pediatrician, and Irmgard Wessel, a clinical social worker and community activist, to continue their decades-long efforts to make New Haven a better place for all its residents.
“Sarah Taylor’s project is a particularly appropriate choice for this award given our parents’ professions and interest in the well-being of New Haven’s youth,’ the Wessel family said. “Moreover, one of us kept bees himself as a teenager. We greatly admire her creativity and dedication to making life better for young New Haveners.”
The Wessel Fund is a donor-advised fund at The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven. Each award comes with a cash grant to the local nonprofit.
The most recent previous winners of the Unsung Heroes Award were the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen and Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS).
Other past recipients of the Wessel Fund’s prize include: Collective Consciousness Theatre (Dexter Singleton), Junta at Big Turtle Village (Rafael Ramos), Solar Youth (Joanne Sciulli), Karen DelVecchio, Donna Savia, St. Martin dePorres Academy (Mary Surowiekci), Bikes for Babes (Dan Perrotto), Grandparents on the Move, the Connecticut Health Policy Project, the Mob Squad (Al Shakir), The Natural Guard, the Inner City Bicycle Program (David Clough), The Cesar Jerez Catholic Worker House, and Leg Up (Anne Gallant). Also, Dan Kinsman, music instructor at Fair Haven School; Raymond Wallace, founder of the Guns Down, Books Up organization, and Music Haven, which brings music to local youth.
Donations may be made online to support the work of the Wessel Fund or by check to The Morris and Irmgard Wessel Fund, c/o The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, 70 Audubon Street, New Haven, CT 06510. All gifts are tax deductible. For more information about the Fund, please contact David Wessel at karpwessel@aol.com