📰 Community Updates

1. 48 Hours Left to Donate to our Gitcoin Grants: As you're reading this, we're in our second Gitcoin Grants round this year! 🙌 We're humbled to have been selected for three different rounds: Climate Solutions, CELO Real World Builders, and Token Engineering the Superchain. These three discreet projects— ranging from solar microgrid installations in Tanzania to adapting our carbon tokenization framework for methane— are all designed to grow Change Code's utility. If you have a moment to check out our above-linked proposals, pass them along on socials, or donate even just $1 (which could be matched up to 100x), we would be so grateful.

   The round closes at 8:00 pm ET on Wednesday, 21 August, and if you've never donated to a Gitcoin project before, it's a great way to gain a new on-chain experience while simultaneously supporting a public good that matters to you!

2. Congratulations to Change Code Co-Founder, Chris Georgen, who married his best friend, Laura, on August 8!

   

   We took some time away earlier this month to celebrate their wedding in the beautiful surroundings of Madeira, Portugal. 🇵🇹

   Home to Christiano Ronaldo, the famous Madeira wine (sampled and 100% recommended by our team), and to some of the most spectacular sunsets on Earth, we also learned that Madeira has 6 different microclimates! Look no further if you're on the hunt for your next rest and reset location. 🌞

   

3. Community Call #2 Recap: Thank you to those who joined our second community call on 16 July! Co-hosted by Drew Simon of Crypto Altruism, we had 41 people tune in as we took a closer look at how exactly Change Code is using hypercerts (tokenized claims toward positive impact). To make this topic as tangible as possible, we walked through a real-world example of mapping the economic growth work of our partners at Jibu into hypercerts. Huge thanks to Moses Maurice Mugerwa, Jibu's VP of Operations, who joined Chris and Drew in addressing audience questions about how providing clean water and setting up small businesses can be represented as cohesive digital assets.

4. Upcoming Community Call: To stay updated, pencil us in for the next community call on 4 September, where we'll be talking about how we can accelerate public goods funding, specifically examining on-chain impact bonds. 🌍

5. Gratitude: We'd like to extend our gratitude to the team at The Solar Foundation, which utilizes blockchain and innovative partnerships to fund and accelerate access to off-grid solar and productive appliances for underserved communities in emerging markets. Coleen Chase and Jon Ruth have graciously spent time with us to workshop some exciting new expansions to Change Code's primitive base, including the issuance of a Social Impact Bond (which you can check out in this Gitcoin round 😉).

6. Project Spotlight: We are excited to highlight our work with Jibu, a social business that capitalizes, equips, and trains emerging market entrepreneurs to launch and grow essential service franchises, with drinking water as their premier product. Stay tuned for our Change Credit marketplace later this year, where you'll be able to see firsthand how becoming a stakeholder in Jibu's impact will create 30+ new jobs and provide 2,500 households with clean drinking water. 💦

🗓 Come Hang!

Tues. and Weds., 20 and 21 August @ 8:30 am ET. Let's GROW Live on Spaces with the members of the Let's Grow DAO community, Drew from Crypto Altruism, Gitcoin grantees, and generally inspiring humans.

Weds., 4 September @ 7:30 pm ET. Community Call #3: Opening up Impact Bonds with Web3, featuring both Crypto Altruism and our friends at The Solar Foundation.

📚 Knowledge Base

If you’d like to learn a bit more about Change Code, please feel free to check out our evolving Knowledge Base.. 

In each newsletter, we’ll provide a short summary of a topic that helps you get to know Change Code’s mission, technology, or approaches to impact tokenization. In line with our first community call, here we address the basic problem Change Code seeks to address: the impact capital problem. 

🌍 Currently, the global impact funding market, ranging from development aid and philanthropy to ESG-oriented funding and impact investing, totals approximately $2.6 trillion. This capital flows to and through large players like UN agencies, millions of NGOs, and for-profit social enterprises. Despite what might seem like an immense amount of impact funding, experts estimate that we face an annual $4 trillion gap in reaching the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. At Change Code, we believe that a small part we can play in bridging the growing financing gap is to create solutions to unlock further sources of capital.

💵 Change Code also aims to address the access gap resulting from a relatively opaque, inefficient, and highly centralized impact funding paradigm. The most innovative and respondent models, such as smaller-scale social enterprises or community-based organizations, are often constrained by high costs of debt, selection biases in grant-making or investment diligence processes, arduous manual reporting requirements, and low levels of liquidity. We seek to engender a more impact-maximizing capital deployment paradigm by providing a platform for smaller, lesser-known, or perceptively ‘higher-risk’ organizations to present and verify their impact track records. 

🤝 Finally, let’s talk about what Change Code calls the impact discount. When seeking capital, be that calls for proposals, grant applications, or social venture pitches, employees or founders of impact organizations are often forced to present budgets with razor-thin operating margins or below-market salaries to be competitive with other organizations. There’s an expectation that an impact organization can operate without the infrastructure that any functioning organization requires. This hollowing out results in a distorted valuation of the impact they are producing by not capturing the true cost of achieving it. Change Code aims to correct this discount on impact by helping organizations capture and communicate the true costs of achieving outcomes, enabling them to secure more appropriate funding and build the requisite infrastructure.

📰 Community Updates

1. Giveth’s GIVEarth QF Round: We are honored that Change Code’s application to this quadratic funding round was accepted! If you’d like to support us by donating or just circulating our Giveth page on socials, we would be so grateful.

2. Community Call: Thank you to those who joined our first community call on 25 June! Co-hosted by Drew Simon of CryptoAltruism and ReFi legends, Tereza Bízková and Civil, in addition to some "Hello, World!" content, we took a closer look at the impact capital problem briefly outlined above. To stay updated, pencil us in for the next community call on 16 July (10 am ET), where we'll be talking all things hypercerts (tokenized claims toward positive impact). 🙌

3. Gratitude: We'd like to extend our gratitude to the team at Web3forGood, who have graciously provided a voice to Change Code as we've been building up our community presence. If you're looking for quality content about public goods and changemakers in web3, we highly recommend subscribing to their weekly newsletter!

4. Project Spotlight: We are excited to highlight our work with BCarbon, a science-first registry and research body incubated at Rice University. Since initiating our work with BCarbon in March of this year, we’ve helped them tokenize 38K tons of web3-native carbon credits. To date, all credits represent soil and forest-based sequestration, with methane capture and blue carbon programs on the roadmap.

5. GG20 Roundup: In May, we completed our first Gitcoin Grants run in the Climate Action, Hypercerts, and Token Engineering Commons rounds. Through the support of the ReFi community, we raised approximately $12K, critical resources for onboarding our first cohort of non-carbon impact projects and for continuing to build out our hypercerts and EAS integrations. Feel free to check out Susie K's GG20 Showcase, where we had a chance to speak alongside other projects like AgroforestDAO and The Solar Foundation. 

🗓 Come Hang!

Thursday, 4 July: Susie K's Web3 Thursdays presenting a special GIV-Earth Showcase (10:00 ET/14:00 UTC)

Tuesday, 16 July: Community Call #2: Diving into Hypercerts; Drinking Water Access in East Africa (Co-hosted by CryptoAltruism, 10:00 ET/14:00 UTC)

📚 Knowledge Base

If you’d like to learn a bit more about Change Code, please feel free to check out our evolving Knowledge Base.