Volunteering for the conservation of biodiversity and the environment

The project originally started in February 2023, I joined the team from July till November, with the hosting organization GEPEC-Edc, a Catalan ecological organization.

Finca Canyadell:

The main attribute of the project was for 8 people to live together on a land between two small Catalan towns on the beach, where we would take care of the farm, garden, plants and animals. The other part of the project was different for everyone, varied between administrative work, local environmental research, managing social media and helping with the environmental education – this one was my job. 

Normally we had 2 days per week when we were working all together on the farm, maintaining the whole little paradise, planting new indigenous plants, as well as weeding out the invasive ones, to keep and stabilize the biodiversity on the whole land. We also looked after our small but fertile vegetable garden, and used the veggies later in our dinner. 

The other days of the week we were all working on our specialization. For me it was always different, due to some organizational problems it wasn’t like it was advertised at the beginning, sometimes I was helping out with workshops for kids and families (this only happened a few times unfortunately), most of the time I was designing games in Canva, as future activities for schools. I really started to miss working outside, so after 2 months of mostly in front of the computer I had a talk with our coordinator, telling her that being in an office is not really my thing and I would like to change something about my role. She was understanding and after a bit of time I found myself in a different segment of the project, I was measuring monumental olive trees – meaning very big, old trees – so they could become protected, and no one would be allowed to cut them out. We were doing this in pairs for a whole month, walking on olive fields from one big tree to the next with a measuring tape for hours. It was fun.