Edition 11: NGOs x Web3, a better substrate?

• 🔥 The New Stuff: We’ve got a few little bits for you this week, incl. the big KO moving the Proof of Impact (to scale) debate onwards

• 🧠 The Deep Stuff: A great chat with Marko Kasic, of FundLife

Summer’s in full swing, and while much of Europe is on actual fire, we’ve been idly chatting with good friends. Climate change deniers may cite 1976 as their evidence that nothing could possibly be wrong – not-dodging another temperature record breaking July with all the deft skill of Mr Bean - but we know there’s something deepy wrong we need to confront. At times like this we go back to Joe Brewer’s article on planetary collapse and trauma. 

Its seriously hot though. And while we fry, we’re just here finding out what makes Impact Orgs tick. And from the horses mouth no less, with our friend Marko. 

And on de-risking carbon, Kevin Owocki went on the BanklessHQ newsletter, and progressed the Proof of Impact debate with a great think piece, potentially co-opting a bunch of free-thinking degens in the process. Here's our TLDR of his thought trajectory:

• As Web3 space matures, more capital will redirect from Ponzinomics to regen projects that have a positive impact on humanity

• But what models could capital redirect to?

  • 1. Scaling Gitcoin Grants: capital could flow to preexisting projects with the tooling to scale and/or be white-labeled. Less risky.

  • 2. Disrupt the NGO game: a huge opportunity (as we highlighted here) to service a multi-trillion $ sector with technology that provides transparent payments and governance.

  • 3. Long-Term Greed: creating financial assets that provide returns after decades.

  • 4. Retroactive Public Goods Funding: improving incentive mechanisms to provide a financial ‘exit’ for non-profit organisations. High risk, though high upside.

  • 5. Impact Certificates: proof of verified impact, which can be sold or soul-bound, and act purely as social status. High risk, but again, high upside.

• How to front-run this maturation of capital flow?

  • 1st. Find a project and add value +

  • 2nd. Make sure you are early to the project +

  • 3rd. Great people will make it a success +

• To summarise: By front-running the opportunity, you are creating the opportunity! Nice.

When we saw a tweet from FundLife about their intention to join up with The Giving Block we had to make contact with project founder Marko Kasic. 

Here, in our first ever SJ interview, Marko takes us through his, and Fundlife’s journey. But first, here’s the TLDR:

• FundLife, the Impact startup Marko founded, exists to enable education and play for young people in the Philippines with the aim of “creating educational and employment pathways for highly vulnerable youth so they may unleash their potential on the world”;

• Or as they like to say it, FundLife enables children to “dream in colour”;

• Human trafficking, educational exclusion and economic dependence of other family members are some of the challenges that young people they work with face;

• With one of the longest school shutdowns in the world in their region, Covid hit FundLife’s work hard;

• They’ve been exploring collaborations which involve how Web3 solutions can store young people’s identity and qualifications online, whilst also looking at funding the hardware and software of their programmes.

Read on!

Thanks for joining us Marko. Welcome to Schelling Joint. 

Who is Marko Kasic, and what drives you?

Heavy question to begin with! I was born in Croatia but grew up in London. I was lucky, I guess. The reason my parents left the Balkans was the war, but it didn’t impact me until I was going to school in the UK, and I realised that many of my old friends at home weren’t getting the same education as I was. 

In adulthood I became aware of the power of being social and having networks. And when I was introduced as a traveller to the amazing culture of the Philippines then I began to think about FundLife as a social start-up.

SJ: Tell us a bit about how and why you started Fundlife? What's the origin story?

At first, I thought: there’s too many NGOs – not another NGO; that’s not what we need. But I came to realise that in NGO-land there was a lack of connectivity and influence. So, I thought that one thing I - and FundLife – could do, was act as a bridge – trying to connect people of influence with people with potential on the ground. 

At that point I was thinking a lot about ‘potential’ and young people who all have their own talents but lack opportunities to express them. Sport then appeared to us as a really empowering place to start, and so FundLife started as an NGO that uses sports to empower young people who maybe lacked confidence to pursue their dreams. Sports and play gave them permission to dream; and at least on the football pitch they could be who they wanted to be. 

Now we’ve developed and it’s become about enabling forms of education, and about removing barriers to education. 

And over time our philosophy hasn’t changed; just our access and credibility. Our ideas get heard now, when at the beginning we were quite small and quiet. 

SJ: Who are the team at FundLife, and what impact are they having?

We have 12 Full Time staff, 100% local. All on the ground in the communities we work with in Cebu and elsewhere. Last year we reached over 6,000 young people. But this has been hugely impacted by Covid. Now we’re trying to go bigger, creating support networks and positive role models. We’re doing much more on what happens between the programmes when young people aren’t with us. For example, we may be doing something really positive and it’s having an effect, we have to recognise that there can also be other influences on kids’ lives. We need to work with those and try to figure out how to make sure they don’t counteract the progress young people are making with us. 

Another thing we are coming to realise - and that Covid has sharpened awareness of for us - is the importance of both local and global role models. 

In terms of impact, our reach-potential is huge, and we want to work closely with more public schools across the region. 

SJ: Tell us a bit more about how Covid impacted Fundlife’s work?: 

Well, it completely shut down all our regular work. At Fundlife, 90% of our regular programming is face to face. And around 60% is in schools. But when the lockdown hit, the Philippines government decided to keep schools closed for two years and 3 months, and I think our country was quite unique in that regard. We had to change our entire approach. 

We focused much more on young people mental health, and really started to examine the health impact of covid and the psychosocial impact on our students. We asked what long term effects Covid might be having on their cognitive development. 

And I’ll be honest, it (the pandemic) took the wind out of most people in the sense that we were so uncertain for a long time. But I would say this was especially pronounced for our young people. For example, take the personal uncertainty we all felt, and then imagine that playing out in youth who did not know how their basic needs would be met; the needs of their families also. It was severe pressure, and those feelings probably resonate still now, as we just come out of lockdown. 

This was something we became really interested in at Fundlife. We moved to do more support and wellbeing work, and we tried a lot of different things to supplement education, from learning-from-home-packs to digital access to information. But it was hard, because many kids in the Philippines are not digitally connected, other than when they spend their time with Fundlife. 

Today, we are still partially restricted in what we can do. Face-to-face is still massively limited in schools. We’re into what we call ‘blended learning’, and just once or twice a week because classes are not meeting much more than that yet. We are able to bring our football, sports, and play provision back though, because its outside. So that’s a good thing. 

SJ: We saw some super interesting news about Fundlife deploying a web3 solution to fund certain aspects of your education provision. Tell us about why you chose to go this route? 

What got me excited was the same thing that got me excited about football for social impact: it seemed innovative, and it was something I hadn’t been exposed to before. I took a step back and looked at the potential and the use cases of web3 for a time. Decentralised finance for example points to the possibility of a more inclusive economy, which is very important to the people we serve in the Philippines. And moreover, I could see the potential of Web3 decentralising for education. 

To say a bit more about that, for example, I take it with a pinch of salt when people talk about the SDGs and education, because kids going to school doesn’t equate automatically to them learning. This is because a key challenge for us right now is keeping young people in the system of education, and making that experience interesting to them. 

But taking qualifications as a starting point is different. So, we’ve looked at blockchains in terms of safeguarding young people and their qualifications, and in terms of how their rights are protected in their communities. So, we are exploring how we can use technology to help young people store identity that they own, and that they don’t lose their digital footprint if they drop out of school, and then later want to return. 

It's very difficult in part because of the experience of web2 here. Where people do have access to devices and the internet, the Philippines sees very high digital engagement, and especially in social media. This can stir a lot of negative feelings in some young people. It can also feed some stereotypes and create some feelings of path dependency. For example, there’s this stereotype about young women and old men (where older men from North America and Western Europe come to the Philippines to recruit a younger bride). So, in families, this has been historically seen as a way out of poverty. This is quite a negative feeling, and a huge pressure for young women, as their decision about their life-partner can affect their family’s future. 

Social media doesn’t help, as it can somehow deepen the perception of the objectification of women in wider society. 

So Web3’s future in the Philippines will be in part dependent on the way people reflect on Web2. The potential is there. But the huge levels of content consumption can be pivoted towards more educational and positive content for young people. 

And the will is there. Axies infinity was a great example. 40% of all Axies infinity players, I think, were based here at one point. From an interest perspective it’s there. But now in this market, it’s no longer a viable way for people to earn. So that’s hurt the perception of blockchains for sure. 

So, we must be responsible and cautious. 

SJ: What is it about blockchains that excites you personally Marko, the most?

I resonate with the aspirational goals for the technology. Moving centralised power away from large institutions to a different form of economic and social engagement – maybe what we would call a more stakeholder capitalism approach – seems more sustainable to me long term. Big business hasn’t delivered, despite the purpose rhetoric. With blockchains there’s a much more robust way to make governance impactful and to connect donors and investors to projects, tracing funds and showing transparently how funding is being used in real time. 

And as I said before, also showing how tamper-proof digital certificates can become a digital ID for students. 

To say a bit more about that, their educational attainment with us is high quality education, but we’re starting to focus more on micro-curriculum. That way young people can figure out what they like, bit by bit, and get certificated. We really like a company we collaborate with called reskills. They create bite-sized content for mobile phones, so its quick and easy for youth to consume. An advantage is also creating digital certificates where people can build up their diplomas and record market-relevant skills, so imagine that on a blockchain. 

SJ: The brilliant young people in the communities Fundlife serves: are they engaged in crypto yet? If so, how?

Hard to say with any certainty about young people and crypto in our locales yet; I would say they are not that aware yet. I would say that in the main the idea of what the future of technology will look like hasn’t reached the mainstream yet. 

Mobile gaming though is a different story. Axies Infinity as we already mentioned, hit the right notes with that demographic (young people). And we do have mobile wallets of course, but mainly people fill those with fiat currency. 

SJ: Lastly, just tell us a little bit about what the near-term future holds for FundLife and what you'll be focusing your attention on as a founder? 

We’re still committed to delivering our 2030 roadmap, which means we’re still working toward the SDGs. We’re also still scaling to more schools all the time. 

We need to continue to collaborate, and we invest heavily in that, especially with the Ministry of Education. But we’re also looking at digital inclusion and so we are talking with more blockchain companies. I find that many founders in that space share our purposeful mindset, and share that passion for decentralising opportunities, or decentralised education. For me that’s the next step. 

But I also see an opportunity for increasing the capital behind infrastructure. One of the things I am super excited about is to use NFTs to raise funding to build up spaces to play here: there isn’t enough infrastructure available for young people to play and learn in the Philippines. And where it is there, it’s not enough or its not freely available. 

One thing that hasn’t been fully utilised yet is the community of people that come to South-East Asia to travel and work. Digital nomads, and such. These people would probably like to invest in solutions because they enjoy being here and want to contribute. We hope to develop a proof of concept, using seed capital as a social enterprise, that may work on getting travellers to stay and help. This is a relatively untapped market: Gen Z when they are travelling and working. 

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