B4H WELCOMES 2020 WITH OPEN ARMS
Recap of 2019 and the journey ahead of us
2019 has been an extraordinary year; it allowed us to structure our organization, further develop our value proposition, and support projects that earned recognition through the b4H Awards. Our mission remains unchanged, and with the key learnings from 2019, we are energized to fulfill our mission by fueling the adoption of blockchain-powered solutions that aim to address gaps in society and protect the environment.
Society is increasingly looking to companies, both public and private, to address pressing social and economic issues.
We Identify, help build, and Implement impact projects.
With our decentralized, Catalyzer Program, we CURATE, VALIDATE, and ACCELERATE social innovation models, and together with the teams, we define milestones and the next stage of their project development. Our focus tin 2019 was aimed at working closely with Social Entrepreneurs.
Social entrepreneurs viewed as the Artists of this New Technical Renaissance Era
We have learned valuable lessons that have left us with a profound humbling effect. Our foundation has learned to recognize better the challenges faced by social entrepreneurs. We often compare this talented pool of purpose-driven creators as the Artists of this new Technical Renaissance era, while talented, often undervalued. We look at Social entrepreneurs and tech-driven innovation to be the drivers of economic development and prosperity. We place our hopes and dreams for a brighter future for humanity on their creative/innovative drive to develop impact models that benefit humanity and help build a more equitable world.
We started the year, the same way we close it… Blockchain for Humanity Awards
We started 2019 with six recipients of the #b4H2018Awards; among the awardees, we had the fortune to work closely with 3 of the selected ‘Dreamers.’ We are very proud of the progress made by CriptoConserje (Helping Venezuelan Refugees), CDF (Facilitating Investment for Impact Projects), and EthicHub (a 2017 Awardee) that offers a Lending platform for Farmers with a fair interest rate.
We are closing 2019 with the recipients of the #b4H2019Awards, which recognizes another four extraordinary impact concepts in the ‘Dreamers’ category: AgUnity, EthKids, PolloPollo, and VenezVit (see more below). The ‘Shapers’ award went to BanQu, which came as no surprise to us. We cannot be more proud of this next batch of Artists 4 Humanity.
As much as Challenges were a big part of 2019, we are also fortunate to recognize the highlights of our journey:
Structure of the b4H Organization
Our Core team expanded from 4 at the beginning of the year to 15 towards the end. Most are pro-bono Contributors allowing us to maintain a lean budget. With this expansion, we have now extended our geographical reach with an active Circle of five core contributors who are now focusing on South Korea.
We have structured our b4H application, curation/short-listing, and selection process. We have successfully tested it and satisfied with the results. We learn as we grow!
2019 was also a busy year building Coalitions! The team co-organized and participated in global meetups (Geneva, Montevideo, Madrid, Buenos Aires, Berlin, Seoul). All meetups were critical drivers of the #Coalitions4GOOD movement.
Last but not least, we gained access to a larger pool of Judges, in addition to reaching a more significant industry network and exceptional mentors. https://medium.com/b4h/the-b4h-2019-awards-selection-309ae226009c
A non-zero-sum approach which expands the pie to everyone reinforces our value proposition
There is something compelling about dedicated social-entrepreneurs with an idea that could make a difference in the lives of many. They are relentless in their drive to validate the impact of their approach. However, not everything is as easy as it sounds; social impact projects have their very unique challenges added to the known struggles of early-stage startups. To expand the support to impact projects, we sparked the #Coalitions4GOOD movement. In 2019, we invited like-minded organizations to unite efforts and assist these projects with technical and business challenges. We carried a #Coalitions4GOOD 3-day workshop with Web3 summit participants and conducted several ideation sessions to help find a workaround to Impact projects’ technical problems.
b4H Catalyzer Program
We launched the b4H Catalyzer Program this year to formalize the support of the b4H Awardees. The program’s three-pronged approaches:
1- Increased visibility of projects, 2-Business and Technical Support, and 3-Connecting the dots.
Core contributors, Mentors, and Sponsors join in the effort to accelerate these purpose-driven projects.
The b4H TG Community lies the foundations to spark the MAGIC!
We have an engaged community that speaks the same language and works on the same frequency. Collaboration is highly encouraged between complementary projects that can gain benefits from partnerships, knowledge, and sharing open-source code.
Drawing inspiration from the Artists of our Tech Renaissance era: The b4H Awards
In the last two years, b4H has issued 19 Awards to recognize the work of positive impact projects that have managed to use the Blockchain technology as a benefit packed software that can be adapted to solve challenges in society. More than 80 Applications were processed, demonstrating the interest and passion for implementing purpose-driven, entrepreneur-led innovation models.
Since we started with the b4H Awards in 2017, we have seen an evident increase of pro-sociality use cases. To be more precise, a 30% increase in 2018 from 2017 and more than 50% this year compared with 2018.
One remarkable data point revealed from the assessment of all applications is that the top 3 categories, equally distributed are found to be: Financial Inclusion, Social Integration/ID and Socio-economic inclusion, the latter one with an increase from 17% to 30% in 2019 alone. These are inspiring numbers; we can see how we are moving from an idea/concept of the blockchain for Impact to proof of concepts, pilots, and full products.
Looking at 2020
Time to Grow
We are looking at expanding the b4H scope of work with new value-added core activities that help complement the Foundation’s mission. The expanded activities will help build the capabilities to implement self-sustained funding models. With this in mind, we welcome committed contributors that can take ownership of different activities within the organization.
Fundraising Matters
We learned that more than 50% of the projects end up on Stealth mode due to limited resources. Seed funds may change the circumstances for these projects and help them complete key milestones.
In 2020, we are implementing a fundraising approach for early-stage impact projects through ‘Art 4 Humanity ’. Until now, donated funds have allowed us to cover most of our expenses these years, but still not enough to offer a milestone-based ‘Unicorn’s Started Seed’ to recipients of the b4H Awards and other great projects that are changing the world for the better.
Our first goal is to raise $100K (in Cryptocurrency), use a smart contract to manage the funds’ distribution by creating the project’s milestones plan and then enabling the distribution of funds, once the milestones are completed. We support full transparency and adhere to the same principle for any project that gets grant support. https://www.b4h.world/fundraising
An important note:🦄 Without our sponsors, we wouldn’t be able to make it this far, THANKS to StratumBlue and Bitsmo Exchange for contributing to our cause. 💕
Unleashing Positive Impact, the power of Creating Businesses around Purpose: Doing WELL while doing GOOD
We are gearing up to develop and implement a ‘Business around Purpose Program’ to inspire and encourage leaders with Blockchain-powered businesses to create or support social innovation in their respective areas. We would like to see more purposeful organizations that can help unlock social innovation for positive impact. That said, businesses are not expected to be altruistic; they just have to be ‘of service.’
Closing remarks
Before closing this post, we would like to leave you with the highlight of our year — 20 Inspiring Projects that made it to the Nominee stage for the b4H2019Awards. These projects went through a review process that included an interview conducted by the b4H core team. We wish to extend our Congratulations to the Awardees as well as all the Nominees, equally.
We feel everyone is part of this community, and our support will always be available to all.
Join the FORCE, be part of our Telegram Group conversation!
b4H 2019 Awards Nominees
AgUnity — Dreamers b4H2019Award
AgUnity empowers small farmers, improving trust and transparency through optimizing co-operatives operation and communication. AgUnity ensures market transparency across the agricultural value chain.
Artisan Origin
A /O is created with the purpose of professionalizing the artisanal industry, through tools that validate, certify and document; master craftsmen, techniques, materials, creation story. It consists of a blockchain certification for every artisan, as a digital sign to validate their origin. With Artisan Origin a new way of empowering artisan work is possible by giving the crafters autonomy and independence.
Closing the loop
Closing the Loop is aiming at providing solid proof to donors on funds allocation and spending. Increase trust, dignity and equality among NGOs and beneficiaries, Donors and NGOs. Increase impact measurement in humanitarian aid distribution.
DORIUM
DORIUM will enable and support social entrepreneurship and economic growth. Its Community evaluates, rewards, creates and finances social and environmental improvements without further fiat currency investment. DORIUM can change the life of billions of people by changing current incentives and creating money backed by the value of social improvements.
ETHKids — Dreamers b4H2019Award
ETHKids is a Dapp that enables charity donations for children. An open source, non-commercial decentralized protocol using the dynamic bonding curve model as incentive for donor which allows donation rewards, EthKids tries to solve the problem of short-lasting relations with the donators.
FamilyEOS
A project to build a modern and decentralized economy in Venezuela. They offer financial inclusion to locals in need in the first phase of the program, fostering a local and tokenized economy. They motivate university students to be active users of the blockchain space and provide them with tools to learn and build.
Gaiachain
Enables Community Driven Development supporting the Women’s association to focus on sustainable charcoal production. Holding government-issued title to help restore the highly degraded Forest in Ivory Coast; the Women association implements Agro-forestry techniques to produce climate-positive charcoal resulting in a net increase in forest cover.
GraceAid
Provides refugees with necessary clothes and essentials.We aim to track the donated currency-convert it to goods-ship and distribute-verify receipt from individual beneficiaries.
Humanized Internet
Using new technologies to defend the rights of vulnerable people, and give every human being worldwide secure, sovereign control over their own digital identity. Concrete step towards E-sovereignty by providing the basic tools and solving towards persistent storage and selective disclosure.
LendSV (Monetix)
Blockchain based Peer-to-Peer Lending with focus on Microfinance where all parties reap the benefits. A continuing low-interest environment, searching for yield and an ever increasing higher prioritization of social objectives makes this market, however, also very attractive for foreign investors who are willing to lend at significantly lower rates.
PolloPollo — Dreamers b4H2019Award
Moved by the unsustainable situation suffered by Venezuelans lack of food, Pollo Pollo sets out to build a platform (intermediary-free) for charitable donations of physical products governed by conditional payments from a donor to the producer/shop subject to the recipient’s confirmation of the physical product.
PhiEconomy
A framework that creates new types of jobs & economic means to people who want to be part of a a new way of value creation that leads them towards solving their own local problems. PhiEconomy’s model aims at aligning the right behaviors to get people involved in solving their city/province/nation/global’s problems while creating a source of income from it.
Shelpin
Shelpin is a full open source model that aims to support a global movement of Socially Responsible businesses, consumers and brands that turns a % of transactions made into traceable, accountable and verifiable donations to selected causes chosen by conscious fans and consumers as a means to achieve a more equitable society.
Social Diner
The Social Diner Project encourages and rewards social diner volunteers by accurately registering work effort carried out to prepare food and feed the people. At the same time, it is creating an internal economy within the vulnerable neighborhoods in Argentina.
Ribbon Blockchain
A Public health incentive app that rewards patients, healthcare practitioners and community health workers for proactively addressing major health issues and allowing greater access to healthcare for the people in South Africa.
VenezVit — Dreamers b4H2019Award
VenezVit aims at fulfilling unmet needs for live-saving medications to reach people in need. Depending on the country, some regulations impose disposal of medications (from diseased patients) that have been unused and in good conditions to take. VenezVit wants to create an application that helps distribute donated and recycled medications to where it is needed most and can help save lives.
BanQu — Shapers b4H2019Award
BanQu brings transparency & traceability in the global supply chain using a non-crypto blockchain platform to connect last-mile farmers and workers to global economy. Its mission is to lift people out of extreme poverty. With over 200K last-mile beneficiaries, BanQu uses a for-profit, for-purpose business model a to connect the users, brands, organizations and governments.
Cambiatus
Cambiatus facilitates the creation of digital communities (DACs or Decentralized Autonomous Communities, also known as DAOs) seeking to achieve their common social and environmental objectives.Cambiatus offers the technological platform for communities to connect, interact, make decisions and achieve their objectives in a decentralized and resilient way, using social currencies on blockchain as economic incentives.
Community Inclusion Currencies (CIC) by Grassroots Economics
Through community currencies people have a way to exchange goods and services and incubate new businesses, without relying on scarce national currency and volatile markets. Community Inclusion Currencies (CICs), A Grassroots Economics project, propose reinventing cash transfer programs to act as a catalyst for communities to develop and trade their own medium of exchange (CICs) backed by their own productive capacities. Current pilots in Kenya have shown that CICs enable vulnerable communities to have a long term multiplier.
ClimateTrade
In support of Climate Action and aiming to help reduce carbon footprint, ClimateTrade offers a platform where businesses, consumers and investors can transact to offset carbon foortprint while incentivizing disruptive technologies and investing in green financial products.
About Blockchain for Humanity Foundation (b4H)
Blockchain for Humanity is a decentralized, not-for-profit foundation that scouts, recognizes, supports, and receives donations to catalyze resources to social innovation projects applying emerging technologies on positive impact use cases while transforming businesses around purpose.
Contact us
Email: hello@b4h.world
