My Nonprofit Reviews

To me, The Hummingbird Project is a product of a beautiful journey embarked upon by two extremely committed and enterprising torch bearers of sustainable living, Marilyn and Chris. I met the couple at Navdanya, India (a biodiversity conservation farm and learning centre founded by renowned physicist, Dr Vandana Shiva) as part of a month-long hands-on course in organic farming and agroeceology in September 2013.

Marilyn and Chris have an extraordinary quality of captivating a culturally diverse audience while teaching about complex soil structures - a topic that is usually associated with being very dry. As part of their 'Living Soil' workshop, the couple took painstaking efforts in making sure that age, language, backgrounds were no barriers to understanding the importance of cultivating living soil and being resourceful with the processes involved in growing healthy food.

Their workshops made specialised knowledge available. For example, Marilyn and Chris, personally funded and set up a Soil Laboratory at Navdanya for participants to be able to study the different microorganisms present in the soil. For someone who has never studied the Sciences but interested in growing healthy food, Marilyn and Chris, presented information that was visual and tangible. They are remarkably accessible and willing to impart everything they know and do it with an infectious energy.

In India, The Hummingbird Project undertake farmer trainings in rural and remote communities, where most people lack any sort of formal training in agriculture and are heavily reliant on labour- intensive traditional techniques and are also heavily exposed to misleading information about the use of chemicals in order to produce higher yields. For a country, that almost leads the world in indiscriminate use of chemicals in the form of pesticides, herbicides, nitrogen fertilizers etc, we need initiatives like The Hummingbird Project to educate and empower potential food-growers and real farmers in providing good food for their families and for a living.

As a side note, I will never forget a kind gesture from Marilyn, who spent so much of her precious time helping me write a grant for my own personal undertaking.

It is my distinct pleasure to have interacted with such inspiring individuals and recommend their work without any reservations. I am looking forward to volunteer with The Hummingbird Project in the near future and it would be such an honour to help them in any way I can.

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