Over the last few hundred years, western societies have gradually built up systems to provide long term support to the segments of our populations that haven’t done well out of the capitalist system (often the disadvantaged, vulnerable, colonised). We now know these systems as social welfare and philanthropy. In all parts of society technology has enabled “economy of scale” centralisation at unprecedented levels resulting in a massive shift in power towards bigger and bigger organisations within the public and private sectors. In just a few generations the individuals and communities that are being supported by these organisations have become more disempowered as the power and money has centralised. We now essentially have hierarchical pots of money (coming out of our tax system and philanthropy/charity) often controlled by people who are far removed from the individuals and communities who most need support. This system is under increasing pressure as capitalism becomes more efficient, financial inequality grows, and the global commons are depleted.
An increasing number of people in the philanthropic and social welfare sectors are questioning the status quo and advocating for a shift in power back to the community. For example:
Lankelly Chase to wholly redistribute its assets over the next five years. “…we view the traditional philanthropy model as so entangled with Colonial Capitalism that it inevitably continues the harms of the past into the present.”.... "several aims will guide us...Investing capital in ways that are aligned with the visions and values of communities"
Philanthropy 4.0: What Form of Giving Enables Transformative Change? from The Presencing Institute “…but the new complexities of the polycrisis require new approaches from all sectors, including philanthropy”...."Relationship between Donor and Change Maker - Transformative: Trust-based relationship that activate creative collective agency"
Why don’t they ask us? from The Young Foundation. "Interventions have consistently failed to address the most deprived communities, contributing to a 0% average change in the relative spatial deprivation of the most deprived local authorities areas.”....."Community power in economic development - a shift from ‘doing to’ to ‘doing with’"
Where Strategic Philanthropy Went Wrong from The Stanford Innovation Review. "...Dramatic advances in the scale and sophistication of strategic philanthropy have not improved societal conditions at a national level”..."We propose empowerment philanthropy as a new approach to fostering political and economic self-determination by supporting people in finding their own solutions and ensuring an effective multiracial democracy"
Beyond Money: Other forms of capital
With our obsession with financial and material capital in the West many people have lost sight of other forms of “capital”, the ones that actually support our wellbeing. These are the forms of capital that many indigenous, “alternative” and Eastern cultures value more highly than we do in our Western “developed” societies. The seminal article The Eight Forms of Capital emerged from the permaculture world many years ago, elegantly describing these other forms of capital (intellectual, cultural, social, living, experiential, spiritual) and their associated currencies, which are so often overlooked in our economic and social welfare systems.
Financial and material capital are scalable. They can be quantified, transferred, and accumulated more readily than other forms of capital. This scalability is due in part to the abstract nature of money, which allows it to flow across borders, industries, and systems with fewer of the physical or social limitations faced by other types of capital. This strength, the reason that money and material capital now controls the world (and the reason we pay bankers more than teachers), is a key part of the problem. The other forms of capital don’t have these attributes and are therefore not “valued” in the same way.
Intellectual, cultural, social, living, experiential and spiritual capital however reinforce the fabric of local communities, enabling them to thrive independently of external economic pressures. They emphasise the holistic development of a community, where success is measured not just in financial terms but in the richness of life, culture, and relationships. By valuing these diverse forms of capital, localism fosters wellbeing, sustainability and resilience. Anthropologists constantly remind us that we evolved to live in small communities, and Nobel prize winning economist Elinor Ostrom understood the power of localism decades ago with her work on governing the commons.
“There is no reason to believe that the bureaucrats and politicians, no matter how well meaning, are better at solving the problems than the people on the spot, who have the strongest incentive to get the solution right.” Elinor Ostrom
We all know how wonderful it can be to come together as a community to work on something important and experiments like the Frome Study give us real evidence that investment in community building can have incredible results. Sadly for many of us this is mostly likely to happen as a result of some kind of natural disaster or extreme event.
So we have a fundamental problem: a tension between our technology-driven capitalist system, which views the world as a machine to be optimised and centralised for maximising financial and material capital, and wellbeing - individual, community, and environmental -that seeks other forms of capital better nurtured in hyper-local, decentralised communities
The indications are that AI is going to make this tension a whole lot worse (many see this as a new form of global colonisation never seen before).
A new lens - Decentralisation / Web 3 technology
The Wellbeing Protocol, a not-for-profit, began as an exploration of decentralisation / Web 3 technology's role in creating a world where economic models inherently support localism and the "alternative" forms of capital vital for our wellbeing.
Last year we received New Zealand government funding to explore how Web3 inspired governance patterns, combined with indigenous values of collectivism and localism, could reimagine the community grant system. Our first step has been to build a tool empowering informal hyper local community groups (for example parents in a local school wanting to do something about teenage mental health, or residents in a social housing complex wanting to improve their wellbeing) to make their own fund allocation decisions (through micro-grants) in a user-friendly, democratic, transparent, and continuous system. It also allows funders to efficiently and with low risk, "stream" money to large numbers of these groups (and adjust funding based on real-time impact feedback).
We wanted to start to show traditional funders that empowerment philanthropy really works, i.e.
Diverting a relatively small amount of financial capital directly into a hyperlocal community-controlled fund can have a disproportionately high positive impact by helping to unlock alternative forms of capital in that community.
The individuals in these groups can become empowered and incentivised to work together to solve problems for their communities and the planet.
It's low risk for funders as they can get real-time impact data and open or close the fund streaming tap whenever they like.
This approach is highly efficient and scalable (i.e. we can replicate it thousands or millions of times) and ultimately make it easier for anybody to "give".
The Tāne Ora trial went really well. We are now running numerous other trials across New Zealand, the UK and soon Australia with hundreds of thousands of dollars / pounds having flowed through the system so far.
Creating mini-cooperatives (DAOs)
But this is just the beginning: imagine each community group as a kind of mini-cooperative or micro-foundation, or in the Web3 world, a DAO (Decentralised Autonomous Organisation) owned and governed by it's members. A person can be part of more than one DAO and each DAO could own assets with members essentially becoming equal shareholders. We can start to build out tools that help these groups to nurture all the forms of capital that are important for our wellbeing (e.g. savings pools, signalling tools, local event tools, volunteer coordination tools, local currencies, liquid democracy tools etc). When scaled up, by replicating thousands or millions of times, we could create a powerful decentralised network of grassroots changemakers that could start to challenge the existing top-down power structures.
"Coordi-Nations are voluntary interwoven networks of communities, with aligned values and a shared identity. They mutualise resources to redistribute them within the network and to engage in collective action, through participatory governance and interdependency between nodes." Primavera De Filippi
We need your help
Disruption is hard. We’re fighting a system that sees the world differently and resists change. We are working hard to run more trials, build relationships with funders and local partner community development organisations (as we know that technology is only one small part of the solution) and build out the product. We can’t take traditional profit seeking venture capital because then if we're successful we become part of the problem. We want to maximise impact and not shareholder profit (and ultimately devolve our governance to the communities that we are serving). So we need more forward-thinking funders who are willing to take a chance on this approach and help us to build up the evidence base so that we can get more traditional funders on board. The nice thing about this model is that we can start trials on a small scale with minimal risk (for example, with 15 people in a community and 1000 Euros / Dollars / Pounds in their fund) and grow organically as communities, funder, partners become more comfortable with the approach and impact data grows.
So we’d like to put out a challenge: if you have access to financial capital (you could be a philanthropist, part of a foundation, corporate, or simply somebody with some extra money) we would love to show you how your money can have huge positive effect in your community (and you might also see how it makes you happier :) Joins us in our quest to grow community power.
A huge thank-you to the organisations that have taken a risk and helped us to get to this point (The Westpac Government Innovation Fund, Sport New Zealand, Callahan Innovation and Creative HQ)
If you’d like to find out more please drop us a line at info@thewellbeingprotocol.org