S4. Ep. 29 - Impact Stream W/ Will and Michelle

Transcript

hello and welcome to the green pill. network podcast if you're just joining us we are building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers using crypto to bring positive some digital systems to the world this podcast features the people who are doing it and we publish a season of five to 10 episodes every couple months this season is lean Bean Capital allocation machine the world is going onchain in what ways will programmable money allow us to program our values into our money in what ways can we build more scalable precise Democratic Capital allocation than was ever possible before how do we build cryptoeconomic systems that allocate capital in a protop and and pro-social way at scale what are the coolest experiments these are the themes of green pill season 4 lean mean Capital allocation machines my guests today are

will little and Michelle Schubert uh who are working on impact stream will is the managing director of Proto Ventures and Michelle Schubert is the executive director of impact stream and director of global resources at International literacy and development M will and Michelle were back on the Pod about 12 months ago in 2023 I'm excited to have them back on the show to share some up some updates about what impact stream is doing so for the benefit of listeners who did not catch the last episode uh you can catch the last episode is linked in the show notes but basically impact stream is a decentralized NGO that is doing a pilot in the African nation of Togo in order to allow them to do a quadratic vote on which projects in Togo

they want to see supported and uh this is a totally Crypton native project built built on gcoins aloe protocol that allows the citizens in Togo to allocate Capital according to what they actually need so if you go to the impact. stream website you can see that the top projects were a technology education center for adults a youth professional training for textile and apparel manufacturing project a community library a solar powered Clean Water Access Project new equipment for an elementary school Health Clinic equipment upgrade so these are all examples of projects that on the ground are being used by citizens of the local community and impact stream is taking

crypto from people in the west and people who want to fund this pilot and allocating it according to the votes of the people on the ground so the subject matter here is how can crypto regenerate the world how can we disrupt philanthropy and NOS with crypto if you uh in the episode will and Michelle are really sort of Prov out that it's possible to disrupt the NGO model with more effective Capital allocation but also more efficient Capital allocation so I'm just really excited about this pilot happy to be a donor and sponsor of Will and Michelle and impact stream and we'll keep following their Journey on the greenf podcast as long as they keep doing great work so I think you're going to enjoy this episode with Will and Michelle of impact

[Music] stream hey Michelle hey hey Will how's it going hey it's going good how are you doing pretty good excited to talk about impact stream and your successful first pilot but uh let's start with the basics remind us what impact stream is impact stream is a new way of doing non-profit work it's a an app that was launched in West Africa last year that allows for communities to propose solutions to the problems that they are facing read each other's proposals vote on those proposals on chain and then have the funds for those proposals to be sent directly to them and they are the ones who execute the the benefit to their

Community yeah I mean well I'll add to that is like as a donor over the years I I'm always just like trusting that the founders or the the executives or the operating team of these NOS are doing what they say they're going to do but one of the one of the beautiful Promises of web 3 is that blockchain allows that transparency now I can see money moving from wallet to wallet and also with quadratic voting now right where local people can propose local solutions to local problems right their own entrepreneurs can build these regenerative and sustainable projects to kind of lift holistically develop their communities the transparent voting on chain is really critical so really

harnessing the the transparency on chain for payments and and transparency on train for voting allows us to decentralize this poverty alleviation work and so that's you know as we dive into it that's really what we've what we've been able to accomplish here with our first trial in West Africa yeah so we're in the category of using crypto to decentralize what an NGO would do uh to democratize the voting of where funds are spent and I guess like really zooming out this is crypto disrupting the NGO space and in the impact space yeah exactly 100% cool well uh I will remind The Listener that we have done an episode on impact stream about 12 months ago the link to that episode will be in the show notes if you

want to hear all about the pilot and actually hear from people involved in the pilot you can listen to that episode but let's actually get into the pilot results on on this episode I'd love to hear how the first pilot went was it a success what did you learn and what's next yeah so it it was on on our end it was difficult and that was a de development problem we just it's it was a heavy lift like build and and you know get out there but once it was launched and people started using the app we the app grew pretty pretty exponentially from five to 10 users over over a 100 by the time that voting happened I think 120 I think by the time that voting

happened we had like 45 unique proposals submitted yeah and these are people sorry to interrupt but these are people in West Africa right so these are people using their toal sell numbers to sign into the app which then we use privy to automatically create evm addresses so that we can kind of deploy this on any chain so sorry yeah privy was clutch good thing you mentioned that you know yeah a lot of these people have you know don't have any Tech background you know and I think it's something like 30 or 40% of the households have a smartphone in this area and so that was one barrier to entry to being on the app in in West Africa was you had to have a smart phone but you know that did give us coverage to you know 30 to 40% of the the rural

areas that we were working in so yeah about 45 unique proposals were submitted and that was really cool to see because it was hey what's what's wrong in your community and how would you solve it you know and then the people themselves had to prove they could solve it with you know kind of just timeline budget and things like that and Milestones and it was really cool to see you know I've worked in nonprofit work and poverty alleviation adjacent work for 10 years and a lot of the proposals that were were submitted we would have never thought to to make that an initiative you know so it was really cool to see the local people obviously

you know and this is common sense to to you when you're one step removed but the local people know what they need you know and also have have ideas on how to solve solve those problems so that was really cool to see and then yeah voting happened and the results of that are really really neat trying to open up to show our uh all the projects that got voted for will do you have anything to add there yeah I mean I it really because cross culture work is so difficult think you know what somebody needs but what this application actually allows is is for the local people to surface those local problems and then

use quadratic voting to rank from top to bottom like what they want to see and obviously this goes through trust networks and we can talk about the implementation details and you know talk about how we prevent all all the potential pitfalls in this process but that is that is really the the the key thing and we were surprised I mean I was totally surprised the number one project was not something that that we necessarily anticipated Michelle you want to chat about what that was yeah so the number one voted project was an adult technology education center and the was local man named lant he already had been teaching adults to how to use computers and how to you know if you've

grown up in a village and and you've never you know really had computer education never maybe even used a computer it's very hard for you to get a job even maybe as like a clerk at like a you know a gas station or think of anything that would happen as urbanization is moving toward your village you technology is very important to know how to use so the number one voted project was his project to scale and allow more adults to take his education technology education training so yeah that was that was the top voted one we ended up being able to fund about six projects seven if one of the projects was two Wells so um we ended up kind of being able to fund seven projects but yeah another training program for for young adults was was

second and that was for textile and apparel manufacturing and then a community library was number three number for was those two solar powerered clean water wells yeah and that's and that's interesting right I mean coming from the West we would think that something related to health care or something related to clean water or something right related to any number of sort of basic basic like survival aspects would be voted but the top three projects right were education related right it was a this technology education center and then the training and then the education in the in the library yeah so that's I think Super that's super

telling right I mean just the interner scientist than me I spent a decade in a bioengineering lab running science experiments and you try to do your best to set up experiments so that the data speaks for itself and you don't try to bias those results well I think this this was one of those and you know we're happy to happy to be able to serve and and create these public goods for folks yeah the or more importantly they're creating the public goods themselves right we're just empowering it with with money and then we you know we'll chat about sort of how how we're implementing it on the ground next was new equipment for an elementary school this one was really cute because not only did they ask for desks and chairs and books and things like that they also asked for a swing set and a slide and I know that

doesn't sound like bizarre or strange to us but I've never ever seen in any of the village areas I've never seen a swing set in a slide you know out in these Village areas I see kids playing soccer with a lime or with a box you know and so it's really cool to see you know we have pictures on our website pictures of the little kids that are involved in this Elementary School uh equipment build so that was just really really adorable and then the final hold on before we get to the final one I think we skipped over number four pretty quickly there that was actually pretty amazing that they came under budget and did two two Wells right you want to chat a little bit more about it and it's actually pretty elaborate well solar power system right yeah it is it's

actually it's really awesome so this is an area that clean water is just not available and I had been working for many years actually to try to get clean water to this area uh in fact uh before impact stream will and I and I was working with International literacy and development at the time awesome organization we were we all teamed up to help a local Man start a well drilling business because it was such a need to have clean water in this area and interesting ly so we've always wanted a well actually actually it was I also did help to get latrines built out in this area so they didn't have bathrooms anywhere there's you know in there's a middle school and a high school that I

had participated in in getting out there but those middle school and high school didn't have bathrooms so the young girls were staying at home for about a week every month um just because there was no proper area to for you know sanitization and stuff and in hopes of getting a latrine someday we dug a huge hole out there and that was going to be like eventually we'll build a latrine here but there's a hole here for now and when last time I went out and visited there was before the latrines got built I saw like a like a Penzoil can I don't know I mean like a little plastic jug with a with a rope on it and hanging out of the out of that hole and I asked the

Headmaster of the school that I was on a walk with I said hey what's going on here what's this like you know jug with a rope on it he goes oh when it rains this W this like hole is great it fills up with water and we can throw The Jug in to like pull up water from the hole to drink you're like you're drinking water out of a hole like because it rains like that's the dire need for water in this area and so I was ecstatic that in that exact same location less than like 50 feet away from that hole there's now a solar powered well and not only that it also Powers the latrines and uh gives water to not only the

school but to the surrounding Village so that was that was really awesome to see and then the sixth project was a the health clinic upgrade health health clinic equipment upgrade thing basic you know in this area there's about one doctor for every 25,000 people so really you know really dire need for for doctors for clinics Etc and as you can imagine the clinics don't aren't you know decked out the way that we would think of a clinic so this was this was getting some really awesome and basic things you know like birthing beds and and things like that yeah and a huge shout out to coin FX they're our partners they have a brand called move

money that we we spent a lot of time working on off-ramp Solutions from crypto into Fiat right they have a local e-money application called T-money which is equivalent to kind of venmo for those of us in the United States and they use this t- money application for all kinds of Commerce and you know a lot of countries around the world have their kind of native e-money app and so the off-ramp from crypto into that T-money we just found just an extraordinary partner in coin FX and and move money in the cfx labs team and that that facilitated it just saved us a lot of fees a lot of hassle so a huge shout out to them and that's you know that really

enabled this and specifically the sort of the web 3 offramp part of it so thanks thanks to that crew and on that note I want to throw in there that it is incredible to me that and I'm excited that this is finally the case I feel like we're finally getting to the point where we can be creating mechanisms on blockchain and tools on blockchain where the user doesn't know they're on blockchain you know like that was that's such a barrier to entry it's so you know even to somebody that's involved in Tech it can be intimidating and confusing and I don't know if I'm clicking the right thing or am I on the right chain do I send it from here to there and we were able to create impact Stream app in a way that the user just doesn't doesn't

have to worry about that doesn't know their onchain doesn't need to know I mean they might know if they you know read the website or something but they don't need to know they don't need to have special you know Tech background in order to successfully use the app seems like the pilot was a great success I mean that's totally reductionist but just want to say congratulations on proving out the crypto can be used in this way and having followed the project and from the beginning I know that how serious you all were with setting up an NGO actually flying out to Togo and partnering with the local community there and doing a lot of the leg work that I think I think is just really really neat to see so congratulations on a successful pilot yeah thank you cheers for that Kevin yeah so the key aspect of

this is we want other NOS or anyone doing holistic development work any kind of poverty alleviation work or anything that requires surfacing information about what local people need and how local people can solve their own local problems and so yeah for us in West Africa the opportunity both in that surrounding region and for other people to come on and help volunteer to make this successful for us is really key and this is not not an application at this point we haven't designed it for it to be just scattershot used in Mass right I don't think we can support thousands 10 thousands of people running around necessarily together although I'd love

to partner with somebody that help Implement something like this at this point it definitely relies on trust networks right the 120 what was it Michelle 120 people or so got onto the application but we knew them through jacqu and aaria and Latte and minin right and and and the community there in West Africa and that's how we knew that there wasn't fraud happening on this application we knew that those 126 were individual humans and we knew that as we're bringing in the tranches of money right there's going to be a total of around 60 $70,000 moved in in a series of tranches as we get feedback and videos and photos about the progress of

these six projects and it's jacqu and aaria on the ground who know the people in that community that are over seeing the administration of those projects right the movement of money the sending of all the receipts just and that's and that's obviously key so at this point how we have it designed is that if you have a trust Network somewhere in the world where a local community can vote on something like this so you know that you have somebody like AAC and aaria on the ground overseeing it that's great and that's actually a really key component of this is that we don't have somebody from the West over there trying to like we just don't we don't need to be involved right I mean we we were over there initially to help train people how to use the app but once they got it they

started training each other how to do it right and that's kind of the idea we we'd love other groups to to use this and and train their communities to submit proposals and and run more of these rounds and yeah and then just a huge shout out to getcoin the Alo V2 the volunteer developers that help us Implement that we ended up using the C blockchain for where that quadratic voting was recorded and um yeah any other commentary on that Michelle that I miss anything on that sort of plug no yeah it was obviously made possible by the aloe protocol from gitcoin so we were helpful we thank we're thankful for that that's good to hear the season theme this season uh for green pill is capital allocation in what

ways will we be able to build more scalable precise more democratic Capital allocation in the 21st century than was ever possible before and for me this sort of serves as a shining example of doing decentralized Democratic Capital allocation that would disrupt NOS so basically disrupting the administrative NGO sort of game and and sort of it seems like yall did this much more effectively from the perspective of the toges because they actually got a say in what was going to be distributed but it seems like there was way less administrative overhead than if you hadn't done it on chain are those right and and also like I guess I guess like maybe way to to ask you the question would be what Innovations does

blockchain enable in the NGO space and uh you know how does this pilot show examples of that yeah so I would say two main things one is just the ability to as as will had mentioned the ability to gather data that is from the local people themselves that you know is kind of is gathered in an Incorruptible way and the second is funding normally you would have had to have like a team on the ground a large maybe even a Lar team on the ground over there to complete all those things we just mentioned you know the the library the this that you know like you would have had to have oversight you would have had to pay Western salaries to Western people to you know do all these things and so by just you know enabling the the local

people to be the the heroes of the story we saved probably 5x you know we saved you know a huge amount of money by not trying to control it ourselves but then yeah that that first that point on data Gathering we could see this being used all over the place like you know even even here in the states there's people that have wanted to like you know adopt a city block or something I had a pastor come to me and say wait could I use this to like you know distribute out this app to a city block see if our church actually really wanted to do help or to give help what could we actually do you know what do the local people want instead of Us coming in being like you know what you need you need Bible verses every Saturday read out loud on a

megaphone you know or you know maybe they actually would rather have a you know dog run built or you know something so anyways we could see a lot of applications for it and we're actually in the process of uh beginning a second iteration of the app that's even even more democratized and even less need for oversight because we're we're trying to incorporate a real heavy Community attestation model where people can like thumbs up or thumbs down or report like yeah this did happen the well did get drilled there or like report like no this didn't happen I live here there's no well here you know so we're trying to create ways of of scaling that don't take even even the amount of oversight

that we used which wasn't that much to begin with the ultimate goal is that instead of using t- money as an application on their mostly Android phones in Togo they're using a crypto wallet and the number that's on their crypto wallet they they perceive and know that that's quote unquote real money right and that they can just transact with that both in their local economy but then that Taps them into a global economy and that will allow even more transparency from donor into a fund that then gets routed into via the the ranking via quadratic voting gets routed into a project fund which then gets

routed into individual vendor wallets which then gets routed into the employees of those vendors that are actually building the well or upgrading the clinic right or in you know remodeling the library etc etc and so the minimal amount of trust right this fun word in web 3 called trust right we can trust that the math on these blockchains are actually working so that the numbers that we see right these these wallet addresses associated with the projects and with the funds and with the people and then the number in the metadata with related to the voting right so we know that there's individual wallets and we know that there's voting happening but at the end of the day blockchain and like any emerging technology is just a tool right it it's

how do we how does it augment humans and so the idea is that if we decentralize this process that people who are maybe connected to donors maybe perhaps hopefully donors in those local communities right people that are connected to those donors through a trust Network through a social graph of as I mentioned earlier people like Jac and Arya that are then connected to that 125 or so people we as we run more rounds we may learn that maybe a thousand is the right number maybe we learn that 50 is the right number maybe in different communities the number may be may be larger or smaller but the yeah blockchain allows the movement of the funds and the transparency of that data in a way that that you know hasn't been

before possible I wonder if you could extrapolate from here if you see blockchain having a bigger impact on the NGO space and the impact space over the next 10 years or so if you guys are maximally successful what does it look like in 10 years oh man well I hope that's the case you know as we mentioned transparency is such an issue in nonprofit work transparency efficiency you know all all sorts of things that blockchain solves so I hope that other people and other nonprofits see not only our project but just you know the benefits of blockchain in general I mean I could imagine it completely changing and being the gold standard for

nonprofits in the future that like you're not you know right now you can go to a nonprofit and see like a stamp on the bottom of their website that says we have an A+ rating with Charity Navigators or you know some sort of like thing that's giving them a a metal for being transparent or something but like this is transparency you know blockchain is transparency so you wouldn't you wouldn't need a metal you just say no here it is here's my ledger this is our this is our wallet address here's here's where our money's going yeah I think 10 years from now donors will demand that they're using this impact Stream app we might Rebrand it at some point but the demand that the level of of transparency and ease of of movement of funds is there as like an absolute bare minimum and then everything will come down to do

I trust the people overseeing building of these projects are they regenerative and sustainable and meet meet my goals as a donor and and then if somebody doesn't use this type of application to allow local people to surface local solutions to their local problems then it should be perceived as like well that's kind of like that's not very academic of you to presume that you're you're providing aid for XYZ and even in like disaster scenarios right that take in Haiti for example right that they completely wiped out the rice Market because everybody started donating rice and if there were a transparent way for the local people to start just immediately surfacing this is what we need this is what we need uh and then

allow everybody to vote on that at least it would be less chaotic than just every well-meaning NGO flying to Haiti and doing you know just dumping a relief and Aid in a way that's not as methodical or thoughtful about what that means for the economy afterwards yeah well I think this is great I've been in so many conversations since joining the web 3 space about how blockchain's going to disrupt the way NGS work and nonprofits work and for every thousand people I think there's one or two teams that actually are doing something big like this so just want to say kudos to you it's been cool to follow the story and to cover it on the green pill podcast is there anything that as we wrap I didn't ask that you want to say about this project or just your views on the thesis behind this this season uh New Capital

allocation for for NOS yeah I had a lot of things to say on that but I'll try to make it as brief as possible first of all we are announcing a new Collective we have sort of this New Consortium of Brands coming together and web3 Brands some protocols hopefully nft Marketplace that we're recording right now and nft Community all of this will be hopefully announced very very shortly but we are a call to action for people to join us in this movement and potentially a new brand that's coming out that will create tangible impact for web 3 and then other emerging technologies that inevitably use what we're talking about here in web

3 to disrupt NGO work and so the original Vision in fact of the name impact stream was that these web three communities that care about actual transparent impacts right actual IRL public goods would stream as a as a you know a fraction of their transactions into this into these pools which would then go to create impact so if you're part of an nft Community or a protocol or a dow of any kind and you are interested in this kind of transparent donation for IRL imp impact hit us up go to impact. stream join our Discord just you know raise your hand and say hey I'm interested in helping and you know we're we're looking for more volunteers and

organizations to work with thanks will same question to you I do can I can I give like a call to action here um let's do it so you guys heard the first six projects the top six voted there were number seven and number eight were both clean water wells and we just we don't have the money to to do those number eight the water well the clean well for for number eight was for an orphanage and the little kids in that orphanage are suffering from like parasitic encounters and or like you know also rashes all over their body from bathing in contaminated water issues internally from drinking contaminated water so yeah I would encourage anybody who cares

about this sort of thing go to the website donate and be a part of what we're doing yeah and we set up ens addresses so impact stream. eth is our top level budget for you know staff and trying to move as much money through that as possible and then for each round we'll have a subdomain ens so we have too. impact stream. eth which that money if you if you want to give directly to that wallet that money goes directly to fund these projects right and that's kind of how this this whole application works it we just fund the projects top to bottom in the ranking order until it runs out of money so the more that we're able to put into too. impact stream. eth the more that we're able to fund these

projects so if you're willing to donate there that can help fund this project number number seven and number eight all right well this has been a a fun episode congratulations on the successful pilot and uh thanks for coming on the green pillow podcast and for the listeners go to impact. stream in order to learn more about the project and you can donate to impact stream. e any other call to actions for the listeners as we wrap join our Discord we're just getting kind of getting social media rolling so yeah find us on on X Twitter probably we'll we'll do most of our updates I think we'll have some stuff on LinkedIn as well but yeah that that would be awesome yeah yeah thank you Kevin all right thanks y all congrats thanks all right we just heard from Michelle and will of impact stream I am excited about this

project because it is proving that crypto can be used in a cosmol local way basically taking the best practices from Capital allocation in the cosmo in the in the global and applying it in a local place and I think that there's a really a lot of upside for crypto to decentralize NOS thanks for listening to the green pill. network podcast again we are featuring the people who are building a coordination a network Society of thousands of hackers dreamers and doers using crypto to bring positive some digital systems to the world like will and Michelle and like impact stream while you're here if you enjoy the green pill podcast you can collect Greenfield podcast episodes shout out to Sky dow.

MMA on ch. e zerx lucas. e JT nickel. e how. for being top collectors of green pill podcast episodes if you want to join the collectors of green pill podcast episodes you can go to pods. medgreen pill to find all the episodes from this season and to start collecting while you're here please remember to subscribe rate and review it really helps the algorithms prioritize regenerative crypto in everyone's feeds thanks so much for listening and I will see you on the next one peace