Project Overview
Grow Kesennuma allows citizens to vote on how public funds are directed. We are creating a way for citizens of local communities to have more say over where funding should be directed, specifically towards nonprofits and impactful initiatives that affect that community. We are essentially creating a participatory budgeting program using onchain mechanisms including Superfluid to allocate funding in a transparent and efficient manner.
The core problem we are solving is that citizens of local communities currently don't have direct say on how public funding is allocated, and there is currently no way that would make this strategy more effective than current systems.
Why Kesennuma
We are directly connected to Kesennuma local government and Kesennuma local nonprofits. Both understand the power of giving the people a voice considering they know who impacts their lives the most. Both players are extremely interested in creating an effective way for the local community to allocate public goods funding towards local impact.
The local government also sees the benefit of each citizen having an account abstracted crypto wallet that they could directly fund in times of disaster relief, something very important in the Miyagi Prefecture. The local Kesennuma government also wants to use this platform to eventually create a local market where they can subsidize costs of goods and services from local producers to citizens in need of more general support.
Current Progress
We have a working prototype available at: https://v0-kesennuma-aid-distribution.vercel.app with the GitHub repository at: https://github.com/RonTuretzky/GrowKesennuma
We have a hackathon planned for October in collaboration with the local government to begin prototyping. More details about the hackathon can be found at: https://v0-kesennuma-hackatsuon-website.vercel.app
Team
There are two main leads for the project:
Luciano DeAngelo (@luciano on Farcaster) - A prolific public goods onchain builder and supporter who runs Kismet Casa (kismetcasa.xyz), which is a residency for builders and creators to co-live and collaborate. The goal of Kismet Casa is to provide more opportunities to underrepresented talent in crypto to attend and participate in community events.
Hikali Igarashi (@hikalipikali on Farcaster) - Does extensive work with Japanese nonprofits and organizations. Hikali worked directly with one of the local nonprofits in Kesennuma, Women's Eye (womenseye.net), which does work to bring more women into the workforce through education and technical training, fund and operate children's afterschool programs and much more.
Crypto Onboarding Strategy
This project will give citizens an account abstracted wallet with sponsored gas fees so as they vote it will be recorded onchain and the public funds will be instantly allocated and streamed (using Superfluid) to the impactors of their choice. They won't know they are using crypto unless they want to verify their vote is actually allocating funding towards the impactors they have voted for.
Japanese people are very interested in real crypto use cases and the level of transparency and provenance crypto will bring should be enough to onboard them. However, for most they don't even have to know it's on crypto rails - just that their local government is conducting a sort of "participatory budgeting" program, something that has been gaining interest from communities around the world.
Six-Month Goals
We expect to scale funding for local impactors. The goal is to allow citizens to allocate at least $10,000 to 5 or so local nonprofits to garner more funding for the projects that matter most to the local community. Our goal is to see participation in the voting process grow over time and interest in funding the allocation pool from local government, traditional Japanese organizations and onchain projects to grow with it. As more people decide how to allocate funding using Grow Kesennuma, we expect community engagement in local politics and local volunteering to grow as well.
Sustainability & Revenue Model
We are working with traditional Japanese companies who want to support this initiative and sponsor the hackathon in October. We are also planning to work with onchain organizations who also want to support this initiative.
More specifically, as we produce the Grow Kesennuma product and prove the concept with the Kesennuma community we will gain access to local and national grant funding. As we scale the product across Japan we will have access to more grant funding and open up the possibility for a revenue model to sustain and grow the project. We also will have the ability to accept donations from both institutions and individuals from around the world who want to see government funding allocated by the people for the people.
Implementation Challenges
We expect onboarding to be a bit slow but we will combat this by training local teachers, librarians and municipal employees to understand and use the system so they can onboard and support the rest of the community over time.
Vision
I am most excited about the fact that if we prove this concept we can allow citizens of local communities around the world to directly allocate their tax dollars towards local impact. The potential for this to transform civic engagement globally is what drives this project forward.
Links
