Please describe your proposed solution.
In Vietnam, there is no government funding for social enterprises and they still have to pay tax as normal enterprises, hence, it is even more challenging for them to run their organisation. In addition, traditional funders would seek well-established NGOs or Social Enterprise to fund for. This is a real challenge for start-up social enterprises as they would have to seek seed funding in which most of the time would always be the burden on the shoulders of the founders. With such responsibilities, founders then can not concentrate on doing the strategy and operation for their social enterprises and therefore, prevent them from scaling up their models and elevating impacts.
Having experience working in established social enterprises and starting up my own social enterprise in Vietnam has given me the opportunities to learn that not many social enterprises have the same access to financial support or have the know-how to build their own due diligence documents to attract funding. On the other hand, many people wanted to donate to trusted and impactful social enterprises yet they are not encouraged to make contributions, mainly from lack of platforms that give them access to vetted social enterprises that they feel safe to give. As a result of this barrier, start-up social enterprises face challenges in attracting funds to execute their impactful initiatives and build a long term sustainable strategy for their business. In addition, ada holders/donors could not amplify their investment to make a difference.
Believing in the power of community and social impacts, we passionately want to utilize our experience, knowledge, skills and open resources to help bring this gap closer, to elevate social impacts for a better future of our underserved communities.
Many ada holders do not stake their ada in small stake pools, as a result, their investments are all in concentrated stake pools which is not aligned with the vision of Cardano where ownerships should be decentralized. Moreover, there are a lot of ada holders who would not know they could amplify their impacts simply by staking their ada.
Our project will partner with Open ISPO- a funded project in F8 (https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/403106), a service that helps nurture small pools, calculate and distribute tokens. We will engage ada holders/donors to stake their investment into small pools, host workshops to share with them about social impacts and how their investment could make a difference.
Our beneficiaries would be start-up social enterprises in Vietnam that work in:
- Women economic empowerment to reduce gender-based violence issues
- Holistic education for street kids, at-risk and disadvantaged youth
- Healing services for people experiencing mental health.
We consider that these are the three vulnerable groups that need help the most, and they are even more affected by COVID-19. If we can give social enterprises who work to solve these problems more sustainable financial support, they would be able to scale up their model to create bigger impacts. Apart from financial support, we will work with social enterprises to help build reporting framework, due diligence such as: Child protection policies, Prevention of Sexual Allegations and Harrassemnt policies, Anti-corruption policy…etc. In addition, we will be delivering workshops about crypto currency, with a strong focus on Cardano, this way, our beneficiaries would gain more knowledge about this area and crypto currency would support their work and their beneficiaries.
By doing this, every stakeholder of our project would achieve their goals:
- For social enterprises, they would be able to have access to funding, strengthen their organizational capacity.
- For Ada holders/donors: They would learn more about social impacts, able to make a difference without contributing their own finance in the most transparent and flexible way compared to traditional charity giving.
- For small pool owners, they would be able to attract more holders to stake in the pools
- For the Cardano ecosystem, they would be more sustainable with diversity with pools and holders and more people would learn about Cardano too.
Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.
Our innovative solution would offer all stakeholders a flexible and transparent platform and way of engagement between ada holders/donors and social enterprises (beneficiaries) to understand both sides and make the most of the donations.
Our holistic approach not only brings these two groups of people closers to create impacts, but also help strengthen organisaitonal capacity and capability of SEs. We believe that if we want to change anything in this world, it would come from education. We would train our social enterprise partners in building stronger system and policies and framework, this will allow them for long term funding opportunities. In addition, our project would help educate our ada holder/donors to have awareness about social issues, and that social responsibilities are part of what they do (in Vietnamese culture, the giving culture would always come from families and close relatives rather than a community), this is indeed important as they would pass this philosophy to the next generation of Vietnam. We believe by raising awareness of both these groups, the awareness of Cardano and cryptocurrency would be increased too.
What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?
- Market volatility affects holders' decisions to stake their ada
Educate holders on the nature of market and train them about the importance of long term investment instead of short term and how staking would help protect their properties. We will also help them see the vision of Cardano so they could trust the company more.
- Social enterprises do not have access to or understanding of blockchain/cryptocurrency knowledge.
We will deliver one workshop on basic blockchain/cryptocurrency to help social enterprises be able to participate in the program and use funds effectively.