Bloomers Without Borders January Report

In January, Bloomers Without Borders teams have been hard at work servicing the global Bloom Network. Here's a recap of what we did, what our current strategy is, and how you can help!

Objective

Bloomers Without Borders' role is to support the global network of Local Bloom hubs and individual members, as well as ourselves as people!, in flourishing. Each team focuses on a specific area of development for our collective. Last quarter we focused on setting up systems for growth, and now we are beginning to roll those out to increase the number of members in Bloom Network and the size of our Local Action Rewards funding pool.

Creatives Team

Generally it's time to grow Bloom Network. The platform MVP is complete, and it's getting easier to understand what Bloom is: place-based social media with a peer-to-peer incubator for community projects.

The Creatives at Bloomers Without Borders is an open working group for professional marketing and creative professionals who want to contribute their skillsets to Bloom Network and grow their portfolio of values-aligned projects.

In January we have been developing Bloom Network's social media strategy for Instagram and LinkedIn, to increase awareness of Bloom Network and build out our membership base to include more economically diverse types of people.

Our grassroots base is strong and true and beautifully coherent. They need more supporters who can contribute time, help out on the ground, and support the financial development of local initiatives. At the same time, we know people who have money and/or a desire to apply their talents struggle to find values-aligned initiatives to contribute to. So our quest is to connect these folks, while building Bloom Network as an alternative social media company, owned and governed by, and benefitting, place-based communities.

In January we finished a draft of our business deck focused on implementing our first revenue streams: a voluntary monthly membership fee and affiliate marketing of members' and aligned networks' goods and services. We've also been setting up shared media assets for branding social media content, and getting a streamlined operational approach to sharing out Bloomers' beautiful stories from our platform.

What we need now: advisors who can review our business deck and give feedback.

The Engineers

On the technology front, last quarter we completed our payments engine for Local Action Rewards, Bloom's regenerative economic protocol. We integrated Inverter Network's smart contracts directly into our app for an easeful user experience. It's honestly the best Web3 UX for impact doers.

In January, we also completed our FLO (Flowers) marketplace. A combination of a timebank and social currency, the purpose is to build better local market connectivity of values-aligned businesses and people, by sharing our surplus and caring for the people who are doing the difficult work of systems transformation where we each live. We'll be doing one final round of consultations with social currency experts before releasing this live. However, after 14 years of global R&D with alternative economics, we're confident this is going to be a good start to making Bloomers' initiatives even more visible and easy to find.

Lastly, we improved page load speeds and reduced data usage, by overhauling our image hosting system. Next up: applying that approach to the blog post content images. This will support higher quality images to better showcase Bloomers' work and to support the Creatives team with higher quality images for social media marketing of your work and achievements.

Help we need: Volunteer developers, and separately, volunteer community support people! Magenta is a one-woman show on the tech team, and also bears the brunt of community support. It's hard to straddle both those things and we are already big enough that that's getting increasingly difficult for everybody. Good problem to have, but we could really use more help with at minimum 2 hours per week to support on code, and/or community support to answer members' questions and help with onboarding and orientation.

We should grow toward decentralizing the community support role, with each Local Bloom hub identifying a dedicated person who is familiar with the ins and outs of our social network. Diamante Bridge Collective in Costa Rica has begun doing this, allocating some of their collective treasury rewards from Bloom toward this person.

The Treasure Builders

Our Local Action Rewards program was featured in Capsule's blog: Connecting Communities Onchain.

We received an additional Flow Funding grant from Kinship Earth for $10,000! They also contributed $8,000 last fall! Flow Funding is an approach developed by Marion Rockefeller to trust recipients that they know what to with the funds, and that unrestricted giving is often more effective. It's similar to how Bloom Network does our own FLO (Flowers) Funding - Bloomers write about their impacts, and they receive funds to do what they think is best with. In Ethereum, this approach is called "Retroactive Funding".

Reminder that you can find all the info for how to participate in Bloom's Local Action Rewards funding program, by going to your left sidebar when you are logged in a member, and clicking on Local Action Rewards. We are currently in Round 3, for Local Regenerative Actions done and reported January 1 through March 31. Funds available for the collective: $10,000. The grants team is currently reviewing Round 2 reports.

Guidance for how to write an effective Impact Report.

You can grow our rewards pool by contributing to Bloom Network global and several Local Bloom hubs, on Giveth's Lovin' on Public Goods Funding matching funds round: look for Bloom Network, Tribes and Natures Defenders, Diamante, Rifai Sicilia, Earthist, and RegeneraOsa! It's open until February 14, 2025.

Bloom's grants team has been finding grant opportunities that are a good fit for Local Bloom hubs. Similar to the Creatives team, last quarter we spent creating robust processes to churn these out to support Bloomers' work. Local Bloom leaders will be hearing from the grants team when we've found a grant that is a good fit for your region or focus areas. You can directly apply yourself, or lean into our grants team to write a mutually supportive application.

We are looking for grants to produce educational media content to support Bloomers in increasing their skills to acquire grants and enlist more local community support. We completed applications for two grants during January: one for Broadfield Enterprises Uganda in collaboration with Bloom Network for business growth of their local food systems work. And one for Bloom Network globally for our local food systems transformation campaign, Local Love.

The grants team has also been distributing the Local Action Rewards from Round 1. Report coming soonish. It's been incredible how much the community understands the rewards and appreciates being acknowledged for the difficult work each of us has been doing largely for free for, in many cases decades. This is work that often falls between the cracks of the industrialized economy; however, it's also The critical work that will help humanity out of the mess of inequality and ecology-destroying practices.

The largest challenge we've encountered in the Local Action Rewards is actually in Bloomers transferring their cryptocurrency into their country's currency. The easy pathway we set up to work within Bloom Network's app is not available to every country. Magenta has ended up spending 4 hours PER PERSON in many cases helping community leaders set up an exchange account and navigating the hoops of connecting bank accounts and identity verification. This is clearly not sustainable. She'll be posting a guide soon with the diverse of withdrawal pathways we've found necessary so far, depending where each person is based in the world. But most likely we are going to need to fully decentralize the responsibility for that process onto each Local Bloom community to identify a trusted cryptocurrency and technology savvy person who can do this help. Magenta will also be training up Meg to help on this front. But given how time intensive it is, two people who are already underwater with how much responsibility they have on the platform with no pay, is also not a sustainable approach to this.

Help we need: Support from ReFi DAO, Greenpill, and other networks on the offramping front would be super helpful. If you hear of grants or private funder connections that you think would be a great fit for Bloom Network, get in touch!

Alright that's a wrap!

Love and magic,

Mage