São Paulo, the largest city in Latin America, the most cosmopolitan city and the financial center of Brazil. ❤️‍🔥

Through this application, you will understand how we leveraged on the unique aspects that make the city and people connected to it to make an interesting offer to grow the ReFi ecosystem locally.

🏙️ As a Metropolis, the main challenges for São Paulo include access to quality public infrastructure; preservation, regeneration and management of nature co-existence with the city – which impacts overall wellbeing but also air and water quality; waste management, lack of adequate housing for the most vulnerable populations; social inequality and economic exclusion.

The Node activities will focus on creating the environment where different players will meet to coordinate solutions, accelerating the flow of information and resources.

Harnessing collective intelligence, building in public, respecting local culture, beliefs and diversity while delivering high quality work.

Our main objective is to collaborate with the powerful ecosystem and iterate to solve problems. Having a human-centric approach and goal-oriented metrics.

Thus, the Node in the city of São Paulo intends to be the home of regenerative finance in the Brazilian Southeast.

❔ Why São Paulo?

• Taking advantage of the best that the financial market can provide for an active community, engaged, and concerned with the social and environmental challenges of a typical city in the global south.

• On the other hand, a populous city with a lot of diversity, the destination of most of the country's migrant workers. The urban spaces of São Paulo define its plural and cosmopolitan character, integrating effervescent commercial centers, with an active cultural life, and green breaths that are like refuges.

• According to the Index for Entrepreneurial Cities ("ICE") from 2022 by Endeavor and the Brazilian National School for National Administration - ENAP, São Paulo is the best city to do business. The study analyzed different metrics (e.g. Regulatory Environment, Infrastructure, Market, Access to Capital, Innovation, Human Capital and Entrepreneurial Culture), and the city of São Paulo won first place in the overall ranking, followed by Florianópolis and Curitiba.

• And this is how we will leverage on the unique city aspects to make a new hub for REFI in the Global South:

🌳We have the opportunity through our network and planning to nest the hub in one of the parks on Avenida Paulista, which 7 million people pass by weekly. Our pledge to use the space focuses on attracting unparalleled exposition and connectivity to the city and its people, while inviting all to engage with us and innovate on the open for REFI. Once we succeed in establishing this base in an open scenario, this model could be further applied to public parks in other cities. The ultimate aim is of innovating and bring improvements to the development of a green city, having as a platform and showcase ideas in the most famous avenue in the largest city in Latin America. 🌳

🎯 Our goals:

Our main focus is a co-working space, where builders and creators can come together to work collectively.

This space will be home to:

• Events, learning and debates space: we plan to hold a series of events to display the node to different layers of stakeholders as startup founders, social movements, public authorities, investors and researchers.

• Community and start up support: from our experience, we understand that we need a close relationship with our community, so we intend to offer support for the creation and migration of projects to the ReFi ecosystem.

• Podcasts and social media hub: understanding that the most powerful tool we can have for onboarding and education is powerful communication in Portuguese.

We intend to raise U$ 25,000 to set up location basic expenses, draft and implement business strategy for awareness and education events and activation activities for the first six months.

The circle of founders who join this new adventure has ties that encompass the government at the municipal, state and federal levels, the financial market, social movements that operate in the city of São Paulo and in Brazil, in addition to the web3 ecosystem and startups:

✨ Our wonderful team:

Rafael Oliveira | Luisa Calixto | Diogo Jorge

🫱🏿‍🫲🏾 Our amazing advisors:

Camila Rioja | Paula Palermo | Marcelo Silva | Flavia Bellaguarda

We appreciate your support!

🔗 Our links: Twitter | Telegram ReFi Brasil | Telegram ReFi São Paulo

Let's Regen! 🌱