RC Dubno | Honeytime is the of victory

STORY:
My name is Zinoviy Svereda, I am a doctor of social economy, a teacher of social entrepreneurship and community development. I am a member of Rotary Club DUBNO in Ukraine, founder and member of some humanitarian foundations.

PAST
In particular, we won a grant from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Poland to implement the «Social Apitherapy» project.
This project taught the principles of social entrepreneurship and beekeeping to ex-veterans, their families, and refugees from the occupied territories since 2014.
As a result of the project, the following was established:
– several social enterprises, cooperative;
– In several families, members registered their activities for the legalization of activities on homestead plots ( FOP – ФОП ), and started their activities in Khmelnytskyi region.
However, the war forced to reorganize in new conditions. Many ex-participants are back in the war zone. Some veteran beekeepers returned traumatized and wounded. Their families need further help, counseling and support.

PRESENT
The best method is to help them produce and sell what they already have in stock.
It is motivation that we organized Honeytime.
HoneyTime is a unique Ukrainian brand of delicacies and unique gifts. We adhere to social entrepreneurship, so the priorities in the employment are to members from military families.
Marketers, entrepreneurs and technologists joined the implementation of our idea. Having set the goal of popularizing Ukrainian products and creating a brand that will be associated with responsibility and quality, our team is improving its production processes. We work, develop at the local level, create new jobs for the local community and take care of the faster socialization of military families. To this day, we keep the social component, now 90% of employees in the team are wives, mothers, sisters of soldiers.

FUTURE
Many people today say they are tired of war. But we must continue our work. We have done a lot of volunteering, but today there is a need to take a step forward. We must move from humanitarian aid to project and socio-economic activities. Therefore, our method is to create social enterprises in which at least 50 percent of the profit would go to charity, veterans, refugees and poor young.
Social entrepreneurship is quite strongly developed in Europe and USA.
We would like to develop this activity, because we may involve not only veteran beekeepers, but also veterans and their families, poor young, who have fruits and nuts, berries on homesteads, in particular, in zones near war where people do not have any job. A special advantage is that we can organize the sales market of products in Ukraine and abroad. Our goal is the formation of a full-fledged honey cluster of production, processing and sale of honey products in Ukraine and abroad.
However, we need to go through all the documentation, export certification, and manufacture the required quantity. We need additional funding to purchase equipment and new technologies.
We have already learned the main things needed for exporting products. But it is positive that there are agreements on ordering, purchasing and distribution abroad.