Bloom helps more people participate in local grassroots economic development through a feature-rich social network that helps on-the-ground actors share knowledge and incubate their projects. Governed as a federated DAO of Local Bloom nodes, we've built communities around the world since 2008, through regional food security, Indigenous solidarity, and alternative economies. https://bloomnetwork.earth.

👋🏽 We are 33 Local Bloom hubs across 11 countries, and 30,000+ people on the ground. We've jumpstarted over 7,000 local urban and agroecology farms worldwide, 400+ community enterprises, and built permanent foundations for regenerative cultures. We have decades of experience building local economies.

The Challenge: Financing decentralized and collaborative community labor is difficult. Local Bloom hubs are coalitions of interconnected projects, combining revenue-generating businesses, nonprofit initiatives, and mutual aid.

Our Solution: The purpose of our CollabTech grant is to design a cooperative patronage token that any platform coop or federated DAO can use to incentivize cooperative business activity. This builds on our Local Action Rewards protocol, which finances collaborative community labor and bioregional innovation.

Rifai Sicilia, moringa agroforestry + mutual aid + web3 onboarding. Broadfield Enterprises, Uganda, African food and economic sovereignty.

Cooperative Patronage Token

🌸 Local Action Rewards - How Bloomers earn our token now:

• Earn FLO (Flowers) / [X token]: Local Bloom members earn FLO by documenting regenerative actions and the addresses of participants. (I.e., doing the value creation the network state wants to incentivize.)

• Impact Reporting Interface: A user-friendly web2 UI allows rich image uploading and social networking features, making it easy for the public and peers to engage and learn.

• Grants Distribution: Grants are distributed based on FLO earned, benefiting individuals and local treasuries. Details.

Grants, as well as profits as the coop becomes profitable, are routed to the members on the ground who are doing the kinds of place-based labor that humanity needs to massively scale to mitigate climate impacts and solve common societal problems.

What's Next - Your Grant Contribution:

We aim to enhance FLO with community currency properties to support local business discovery and economic development. We want to do this in connection with other network states.

For example, say I live in the Lisbon area. I have 300 FLO / [X network token] from helping plant a local food forest. I type that into the UI, and see offers from near me that I can receive in exchange for the token. I learn about local businesses near me who are values-aligned with this network.

Who among us is maxed out on clients we can take on? Yet most of us are short on marketing capacity to get there. This mechanism allows us to share our surplus and establish relationships with potential customers. In this way, this token approach is designed to kickstart flywheels for bioregional economies. It does some of the heavy lifting of the initial marketing bootstrapping to get a business revenue-positive.

Your funding will help us:

• Design a hybrid cooperative patronage token/community currency.

• Research mechanisms for token backing and grants distribution. For example, perhaps the person I paid with my token is the one who gets the grant/profit distribution at the end of the period. Inverter Network's bonding curves for token economies is another path we're considering.

• Collaborate with other network states for interoperability. Examples: Cabin, ReFi DAO, Cohere Network, GreenPill, and Celo Regional Nodes.

• Consult with Grassroots Economics, Local Bloom organizers and Web3 protocol users.

Importantly, this approach kickstarts regional economies. Imagine if you're able to work 4 hours per day at your tech job and earn money for 2 hours of your day doing gardening at your local agroforest to break up the screen time and touch grass.

Benefits of This Approach:

• Legally above-board as per cooperative legislation.
• Can be used by any network state, DAO, or platform cooperative to route profits or grants to members for value-generating activities.
• Diverse Value Programming: what is eligible for funding from the company can be liberated from only building apps or products, to include social missions, with transparent and easily understandable reporting and accounting.
• Enhanced Governance: Reputation scores can be used to assign Web3-native governance power, increasing Web3's connectivity and leadership by real-world operators.

Budget

Threshold: $1,000. We need to and will do this work anyway. (We've been operating on voluntaryism due to difficulties raising capital for a women-led platform coop.) Having funds for it means we're better supported to complete it.

Stretch Goal: An additional $10,000 to finalize legal membership contracts for our Colorado Limited Cooperative Association entity and publish the legal documentation as a template.

Why Bloom?

👩‍🚀 Experienced Team: Our platform team is 100% women-led with decades of experience in technology transformation.

👩‍👩‍👧‍👦 Community Builders: Local Bloom organizers have been building communities since 2008.

🌿 Proven Impact: We excel in achieving local food and economic sovereignty and are scaling low-cost, effective solutions with Web3 technology.

Transform the future of work by supporting our grant! ❤️

Roadmap

Pictured: IntegriTea Cafe and community center, Vallejo