HODL Hope: Gamifying ETH Philanthropy for Save the Children | Ettore Rossetti - Save the Children

[Music] Rosetti from save the children I head up the intersection of emerging Technology Innovation and Partnerships that save the children where I've been for more than 19 years and this presentation is entitled hoddle hope for children a little bit about me first I'm an identical twin my twin brother's Angelo or sometimes he goes by Luigi and I go by Mario and number two I've got two kids who are now college students and three my twin brother and I set three Guinness World Records for charity for save the children in the sport of tennis and in the sport of pickleball we pioneered the concept of setting world records for a charitable cause and in fact our very first record was the world's longest tennis rally which took 14 hours and 31 minutes no breaks no food no hydration I tell you that story because in doing that to benefit save the children I had an insight and that was the difference between sympathy and empathy you can be sympathetic about the plight of children around the world but you can't be empathic about the children many of whom don't have enough to eat until you feel or experience a little of that hunger pain hence the E and empathy so during that 14-hour and 31 minute Marathon I started to feel some empathy some hunger pain but the difference was we were doing that voluntarily whereas children around the world are involuntarily feeling hunger pain the founding of save the children our founder tine Jeb and her sister Dorothy buckton founded save the children under the belief that all children have human rights in a time when women didn't even have equal rights and they were protesting the plight of children starving because of the blockade in Europe at the end of World War I and she said that all children not only have human rights but they should be protected from harm but they were arrested for their beliefs for creating a public disturbance and when they appeared before the judge the prosecutor was so moved by her purpose and her Cause th though she was found guilty as charged he said I will pay the fine who do I make it out to and she said the save the children fund and that is how save the children was born and now save the children Works in 120 countries around the world giving kids a healthy star in life education and protection from harm both war and conflict and natural disasters we work in the United States including right here in rural Colorado I had the opportunity to meet some of these Refugee children in real life five years ago in Lebanon and when I did I was startled by the fact that nearly half of the refugees in in the world as of 2022 according to unhcr are children more than 43 million children are refugees in fact if they all lived in the same country that country would be the 36th most populous country in the world between Iraq and Afghanistan the population of Colorado is 5.8 million people to put it in perspective so the children that I met in our programs though it was the winter and it was cold in the refugee setting save the children had s child-friendly spaces there's these white tents and inside there was color and joy and happiness and kids were playing and laughing and being children in this bubble a visual metaphor of the save the children's circle around the child giving them protection and I colored with the children and some of them were so traumatized that they were mute and they wouldn't speak but others were playing along and then I played Ring Around the Rosie in the yard with them and then my host took me to what the equivalent of an elementary school and I went there and that's where I took this photo and it's a panoramic view of the inside of that classroom and there were children sitting there boys and girls between the ages of eight in 12 and my host was translating the Arabic asked a prompt for everyone starting with me please say your name your age and your job and I thought that was a peculiar question given that it was an elementary school classroom but I complied and said my name is Ator I'm a lot older than you and I work at save the children and then the first girl stood up and she said in a quiet meish voice my name is Yas me and I'm 8 years old and I pick vegetables in the field starting at 4:00 a.m. every day for 10 hours so that I can make a day's wage so that my family can get enough to eat and down the road one by one every child told such a story by the end of the introductions I was speechless and I was tearing up and I thought what can I do to brighten the mood because now we're all sad and so I did the only thing a a western self-respecting professional humanitarian could do and I took out my smartphone and played with a Snapchat filter with the kids and showed them augmented reality for the first time and they laughed and they were kids and they were shy and they were playing with the phone and they couldn't believe they could see themselves in the picture with a dog's tongue and they were being children they were playing they were laughing I like to say that crying and laughter are two sides of the same coin why do you sometimes laugh so much that you begin to cry they are sibling emotions so they were laughing instead of crying and I wish in that moment could last forever for them but I knew it couldn't because I had to leave but I had a Insight a moment of inspiration and that is a moment of Illumination a light bulb moment why is it that those children are in a classroom and not in a field or in a factory working for their days agage and it's because donors have saved the children in our programs through our cash and voucher assistance programs would give them funds so that they could be in school and learn and be children and not be working for a wage so what if in our digital transformation we in the words of our founder tine Jeb gave children human basic human rights basic human needs and not only the rights but we protected them and delivered them on a blockchain with ethereum with smart contracts using cryptography that could be the future of our work that was the Breakthrough and what if we could solve the sustainable development goals that way which are pictured there and the first sustainable development goal is end poverty why because it's an enabler for all of the other 17 goals so that was the big idea how might we manifest it so we came up with a campaign I had an idea what if we reach out to the ethereum community the Bitcoin Community the crypto community and we create a campaign just for them that you could only donate using ethereum and other cryptocurrencies you could not donate with fiat currency you could not donate with credit card you could only donate with ethereum and crypto and it worked communities reached out to us starting with own the Doge you know the doge meme coin that is popular they procured the official rights of the photo and this should be they said this should be a public good shared by every one not owned by anyone and they fractionalized that picture into a billion pixels and you could buy one of them as a token as an nft and then through their Dow they voted on donating a million dollars from that acquisition to save the children for our work in Afghanistan and they were the top of our leaderboard as far as nft communities and then the world of women the iconic empowerment of women the art collection also supported save the children and they wanted to support our Refugee programs in Uganda because at the time 1.5 million refugees were being housed there and then metag good and onchain monkey the first collection that had the visual asset embedded in the chain also contributed to save the children it was working and in the end we raised more than $7.

5 million doar in Fiat value of crypto donations more than half of which was from ethereum donations from nft communities like on the Doge world of women and onchain monkey and it is because of them that we were able to deliver our services to children like the ones I had met in Lebanon so those children could be children and not workers in a field being denied their childhood being denied their education so we gamified it learning Concepts from the stream team at save the children where we created a team of vloggers and Gamers and YouTubers and creators who would come together and raise funds among their community and we the leaderboard chose the top community on the left and on the right the top token or the top coin which was ethereum and it led the leaderboard according to the coin Telegraph article and we gave them a token of appreciation a figurative thank you gift for their contribution and we named The Campaign hdle hope and that was the hashtag we made it a social campaign we put a thermometer so that even though there was friendly competition in the end children would win they would be the winners that can campaign continues to this day but that's an innovation using blockchain and these communities to fund raise in new and different ways crypto crowdfunding if you will but what if we use that not only to raise funds not only to build community and a global movement of millions who care about children but also to revolutionize and transform our programs what if we were to create and tokenize our service delivery instead of giving cash to kids and Families in Need in our cash and voucher Assistance programs what if we digitized that and we gave them ethereum we gave them Bitcoin we tokenized our service delivery this is a token for education this is a token you can redeem for food this is a token you can redeem for water and it could be available on a blockchain it could be decentralized it could be transparent and it could be near real time in its transmission assuming there was internet connectivity that I believe is a vision for the future of humanitarian Aid delivery that save the children can help help Pioneer with the help of the ethereum community and you're here this week building and developing Innovations doing a hackathon what if we were to build this together that could change the future of the next generation of children in fact children are our future they are literally the future of humanity and it is our duty to leave them in a better place than we left them and from where they started in the words of our founder it might seem impossible to end poverty this way but I believe we can do it we can accomplish the first sustainable development goal of ending poverty in all 17 and the 17th is Partnerships and in fact that's how we can do it we cannot do it alone at save the children we need people like you who can help us achieve this ambition and in fact if you take this world impossible as our founder tin Jeb said it's impossible if we make it so it's impossible only if we refuse to attempt it so if we believe it is possible then it is and we can take that word impossible and split it into two words I'm possible we can do this together you can this this last slide shows you a photo of rural Colorado where we work and children giving their gratitude to all of the donors of Our hdle Hope Community for helping to raise raise funds and awareness so they could have a childhood and not work during their childhood and be denied their basic human rights which are child rights that we all share if you want to join the campaign you can do so by scanning the QR code with the save the children logo and in that I will close with a thank you for your help and with your help nothing is impossible and impossible is nothing in the words of Muhammad Ali thank you very much eth Denver