Hold for Impact Stream | Will Little & Michelle Schubert - Impact Stream

Okay. Is it good to go? All right. We're switching it up a little here and doing our first fireside of the day with Michelle and Bill from Impact Stream. Okay.

I like that energy. All right. Right. So, I was talking to Michelle before this panel and she was telling me how I impact stream is using open source software to reform the not for-p profofit space. It's super cool.

So, if you are wanting to hear this talk, please take a seat now and let's tune in. I'm going to kick it over to Will for introductions, but I'll start with Will and I are co-founders of Impact Stream, a 501c3 that is exactly what she said, using open source software to bring reform to the nonprofit spaces.

All right. So, we titled this a uh nice academic title here. We're going to showcase a novel protocol for onchain impact capital allocation for transparency, efficiency, and public reporting. Before we dive in, we have a little short two-minute video that we're going to hopefully the audio works on this. Is we think the audio is going to be good.

All right, we'll we'll we'll see what happens. A little closer to me. All right,

if you want to hold the mic.

No.

Should we step?

Hey, Roberto, it's frozen. Classic.

All right.

Yeah, start over. We should just start talking.

Yeah. I don't know what happened. Hey, can you come up here real quick,

Roberto?

We should start talking.

Yeah,

this is what I was hoping would not happen.

Yeah, just run. Can you figure out what happened and get it running?

So, there you go.

That's working.

Okay. Can you play it with the audio? I don't think the audio is up. Is he working on it?

This is HDMI.

Yeah, I know. I know.

If it doesn't, it's no huge deal. We'll just try it. We got to give it like 30 more seconds. There are

billion people that suffering in our world right now. There we go.

All right.

I think we got it.

Yeah. Yeah. All right, let's do this. See if it works.

There are billions of people that are suffering in our world right now. And so it's hard not to ask the question, how can technology and emerging technology especially help human beings on our planet right now?

There's so much wrong with nonprofit work and so much of it can be fixed uh or at least helped with blockchain technology. How do you remove all the bureaucracy from it? How do you apply as much of the donations to the actual cause?

What if we could allow local people to vote on projects that they submit to help their local communities that are developed by their local entrepreneurs?

Uh and with impre the idea that that the community submits the idea and then the community votes on which ideas to fund first, right? to meet.

That's all right. We will just talk through it.

All right. Is that showing up? No,

it's okay. Just keep going.

All right. There we go.

Okay.

All right. So, we're gonna be talking about a novel protocol for onchain capital allocation. And I've been going to these my name is Will Little. I'm one of the managing directors at Proto Ventures. And I've been going to these conferences for 10 years.

And people have been talking about how do we actually use blockchain for good? And I um there there are a lot of good protocols for moving money and donating to nonprofits and things like that, but not a lot of people on the ground actually using this technology dayto-day. And I kept wondering, why aren't people actually doing something about it? And I realized, you know what, why don't we just actually do something about it? So, um Michelle, can you just share a little bit about what Impact Stream is and your a little bit about your background and you know, why impact stream's important to you?

My background is in nonprofit space. I was a missionary and nonprofit worker for about 10 years. The better part of that was spent in economic development, helping local communities like the ones you saw uh develop entrepreneurial programs and start and scale small businesses. There was so much, as we all know, there's so much fraud and so much bloat, so much inefficiency in nonprofit space that it's no wonder it's so hard to actually raise money for nonprofits because most of the time you bring up a nonprofit or bring up donations to somebody, they don't know how to trust a nonprofit. They're like, I give money to something.

How do I know if 80% of that is going to overhead? How do I know if the money I give actually goes to the cause that I cared for? And so essentially we teamed up and said, "Hey, we know how to build technology. We know international economic development and nonprofit space. Let's combine these things and create a transparent and accountable way to move money in within a nonprofit and let's do it open source hoping that every nonprofit out there could copy and paste and do the same thing.

So the cool thing about impact stream in addition to the idea that we are prioritizing local voices, we are going to a local area launching uh the app, the impact stream app and saying hey come up with solutions to the problems your community is facing and then vote on them so that we the outside world knows what you guys need and also uh only vote on projects that you believe are viable that you yourselves can implement given the right resources. And so uh after that we go raise money. This the app stackranks all of