Migrant Worker

Environmental Education
Originally uploaded by PEAC.

Pesticide Eco-Alternatives Center (PEAC), where I have been working for the last year, is an organization on the move. Since I started, we have gained 5 staff members, published a number of journal articles, won grant support from a few new donors, and entered what feels like a new phase in the organization’s development. There are two professors and a number of PhD and Masters candidates on staff, strong sense of quality and ethics during research, lots of experience in the field and running trainings, and a very transparent and well managed office. In fact, in my opinion from the last year here, PEAC’s biggest challenge has been its ability to sell itself to the public.

Successful American NGOs are defined by their ability to work the press. In China, keeping your head down is sometimes a more effective strategy. But on the whole, positive international attention is very beneficial to any organization, because it translates into research partners, donors, awards, and the like. This is why I am proud to announce that PEAC recently hired someone to develop a new website (coming soon… very soon… any day now).

In the process of writing the quarterly newsletter, I stumbled upon the photo archives and am working on uploading them to flickr for the newly minted Pesticide Eco-Alternatives Center Photo Archive. Keep watching this space for updates — I’ll fill it in for the next month, and then turn it over to PEAC to maintain. With only a few exceptions, these are NOT MY PHOTOS. In fact, it is an extensive collection of pictures from multiple staff members on a number of cameras spanning more than four years. There are some amazing shots of rural China up and coming soon — the kind of pictures that you can’t take unless you are involved in communities that rarely see anyone from the outside.