Dear TPI Community,
The members of our TPI team have graduated! While we are all excited for the next chapter in our careers, we are sad to announce that the Tufts Pollinator Initiative can no longer offer community outreach events to the greater Boston community. We are so thankful for the support you all have shown TPI over the past six years that has made our work possible!
TPI was founded by a group of graduate students who recognized the enthusiasm among community members for pollinator conservation and wanted to show that cities can be important sites for pollinator habitat. Funded by a seed grant from the Tufts University Green Fund in 2019, team TPI broke ground. We converted two ornamental garden beds on campus into pollinator habitat, and we launched a website and social media pages to share pollinator biology and conservation tips. We worked to incorporate pollinator content into classes on campus, and started offering free events to the local community.
Following a second round of funding from The Green Fund and thanks to engaged community members like you, TPI grew far bigger and faster than any of us could have predicted. We planted over 3,000 square feet of native pollinator habitat across 6 gardens that are home to 125 species of pollinating insects. We distributed over 3,000 native plants and thousands of seeds through low-to-no-cost plant sales. We engaged more than 2,000 people per year through community outreach events, and thousands more online through social media, blog posts, lectures, and a Tedx Talk. We’ve collaborated with 40+ organizations across 8 states to bring pollinator education to local communities, and locally we have worked with Somerville and Medford City governments, the MBTA, and the Massachusetts Pollinator Network to increase urban pollinator habitat. One highlight for all of us was hosting Senator Ed Markey to plant a mountain mint seedling in our campus gardens!
TPI has been a foundational part of our time at Tufts and has shaped each of us as scientists to better understand the role we can play in active conservation efforts and science communication. Looking forward, a new group of enthusiastic undergraduates will work with the Tufts Facilities team to maintain our campus gardens and to restock the free seed library each year. They will continue a limited outreach program on campus at Tufts-sponsored events to promote pollinator gardening. Our gardens and their interpretive signage will remain for you to enjoy and to explore, and we hope you’ll keep submitting observations to iNaturalist to document the impact of urban gardens. Our website will remain as a resource for community members, and we encourage you to contact our former members here with specific questions or inquiries for lectures and outreach events on an individual basis. To stay involved, check out other groups in the Boston area and more broadly that are doing great work in the pollinator conservation space, including Grow Native Massachusetts, Native Plant Trust, and the Somerville Pollinator Action Plan as well as the UMass Amherst pollinator page for resources.
Thank you all again for making the Tufts Pollinator Initiative such a successful program!
Sincerely,
Team TPI, Past and Present
