🌍 Bloom Network helps people discover and spearhead grassroots climate actions where they live, with the support of a platform owned and governed directly by them! With Local Hubs, local media feeds, and a peer-to-peer incubator powered by Web3, we empower people to start and grow projects from A to Z with the support of a passionate global community. https://bloomnetwork.earth

We began in 2008, hosting skillshares and an online network strategizing about what’s next after Occupy Wall Street. We’re thrilled to be meshing with the Web3 community, watering the gardens of the dreams we seeded then!! All thanks to your contributions on Gitcoin. Read on to see what we’ve created with your support, and please share our grant widely. ❤️

The Infinite Garden in Real Life

Imagine if Facebook was owned and governed by its members - individuals and Local impact coalitions - and its groups feature was designed to be a regenerative projects incubator, using the latest web3 fintech. That’s Bloom!

🌽 Today, we are 30,000 people strong on the ground in 26 Local Bloom Hubs across 11 countries, doing climate repair and adaptation as a voluntary network. Food security is the most common thing we work on, building regional food movements that build local markets and peer-to-peer subsidization of agroecology farming. From 10,000 person local food festivals, to market advocacy for local farms, to training over 70,000 children how to grow permaculture gardens. We are scaling up global regeneration led by rooted local communities, and affixing permanent economic sovereignty!

💧 Watershed care is the next most common thing we do - projects like Ogallala Life and Diamante Bridge Collective leading the way with water installations that slow down flow to repair aquifers, reduce flooding risk, and break down toxins that might otherwise flow into our precious waterways. Over time, a Local Bloom weaves permanent relationships between different movements in a region: water, food, economy, justice, and the arts.

🕸️ Bloom’s groundbreaking digital platform was crafted with love and dedication by over 100 local community organizers, making it a true local-first media network. Dive into your local media feed, where you can discover what’s happening in your community and actively participate. Search gifts and requests for gift economy or for hire exchange. Make your local impact work more visible by posting on Bloom, and receive grants and profits as our collective attracts them. It's an "always on" form of retroactive public goods funding, designed by local communities on the ground, to bridge the capital gap to grassroots-led climate repair.

Here is a video walkthrough of our features and the rewards.

Progress

Completed since GG18, with $3,100:

• Smart contracts for RAP - Regenerative Actions Protocol, an open impact framework for communities to self-define what is valuable to them in repairing local climate, social, and economic justice issues. Read more below.
• Welcomed new Local Bloom hubs in the Philippines (Indigenous-led!), Sicily (Rifai Sicilia!), Turkey (Earthist!), and reactivated Bloom Boulder.
• In-app member onboarding that orients people to Bloom and our community values and connects them with their path.
• Submitted our federal US tax exemption to improve our collective access to traditional grants. Developed our traditional grants approach to build the funding pool that directly supports the work of Local Blooms while professionalizing their impact documentation skills.

Why Bloom's Smart Contracts Are Amazing!

The culmination of 16 years of global community R&D analyzing systemic finance gaps and grassroots solutions! Developed in partnership with Integral Network, they use an upgradable smart contracts module with an open bounties system. Members report their impactful actions, and once verified, rewards go not only to them as individuals but also to their Local Bloom hub, motivating them to establish a local treasury for further community development. Open, transparent funding that doubles as a peer-to-peer knowledge sharing hub, so we learn from each other what is working, what challenges arise, and what measurement frameworks are effective. By leveraging Local Bloom DAOs as on-the-ground verifiers, we aim to expand access to institutional funds for smallholder projects by providing a regional aggregator.

2024 Goal

Integrate our smart contracts using smart wallets, onboard as many of our 30,000 on-the-ground members as we can, and train them to use Local DAOs to build and manage a treasury.

Total funding needed to complete this online platform and DAO/coop legal formation: $60,000 or equivalent voluntary labor contributions

🌟We want your feedback: Do you want to see us put up a grant listing next round that goes straight into our regenerative action rewards pool, to be distributed to Local Bloom members doing the work on the ground?

Join Our Team! 🙌🏽

We are growing fast, but our small voluntary team of amazing women has hit a ceiling. This remains our primary challenge in implementing Bloom - we've learned that we need to broaden our membership base to include people in higher socioeconomic classes who have time to give to the global effort. We welcome you to join our community of professionals - Bloomers Without Borders, to help us support the growth of Bloom's global platform and Local coalitions.

We are Local Bloom organizers - master community builders, local food system stewards, healers and cooperative business leaders. Our tech team works with major television networks and dOrg.tech building state-of-the-art, cross-platform cooperative technology. Our media team are professional journalists and marketers from Mumbai and Venezuela. We sincerely welcome you to join our teams. And we need your help in sharing our Gitcoin grant far and wide!

Team: Magenta Ceiba, Meg Rivers, Aishwarya Iyer, Anita Caldera, and 50+ local community organizers

Partners: Inverter Network, MetaGame, Giveth, Kolektivo, American Resiliency, dOrg

🌍 Join in on this transformative journey – visit https://bloomnetwork.earth and follow us on Twitter @ourbloomnetwork. We are making the infinite garden in real life! 🌍🌟🙌🏽 #BloomNetwork #ClimateAction #LocalChange