Our collaboration with ReFi DRC and Yale School of Environment is facilitated by two of our members, Gloria Kimbwala and Jae-Hee Bae. They are weaving preexisting on the ground relationships to further our mission as well as help allocate some resources from ReFi DRC and Yale to our initiative at the moment. The relationship is new but will definitely evolve as time goes on especially with an event we are hosted together with others at Yale in April!

Any amount funded through grants is enough for now get some public goods funding flywheel going on the ground as there are high priority actions that need to take place that we highlighted in the proposal and this round will help greatly with covering those first priority expenses as well as leave room for research and development! We are using mostly self bootstrapped funds to not waste time and are have gone through the process of some very small grants from orgs like Civics Unplugged, but the timelines are longer than needed so that’s a big reason why we’re coming to the Gitcoin community because we know how fast public goods funding can take place proactively as well as retroactively seeing this firsthand as ReFi natives.

For us dMRV is a big part of our initiative on the ground as we are looking to survey the land and water in around Lake Kivu before and after community reforestation efforts take place. We are working on a collaboration with silvi.earth and Atlantis to use their dapps to bridge eco data on chain to monitor the ecosystem as well as the people participating in regenerating it! Working with some of the local universities we hope this will help spurt some amount of community ran projects that can keep the public goods flywheel spinning using the data collected and put onchain to retroactively be rewarded and to constructively plan the collaborative roadmaps for proactive public goods funding! At first this will start with baseline data about the ecosystem and contributors regenerative decision making in the community around where the DEC org operates in order to understand the relationship between the action taking place and the impact being made!