Onwrd

Before we were mandated to stay isolated, many of us struggled with a lack a connection - to self, our culture, our families, our friends, our purpose and environments. This lack of connection is at the root of many of our mental health challenges, that present as anxiety, cutting, bullying, school shootings, depression, obsession, addiction, suicide and the myriad of other mental health challenges me, you and our neighbors battle daily.

As the mental health conversation becomes more important, psychologists, therapists and self-care practitioners are beginning to understand the importance of cultural compatible interventions to better serve the populations they seek to support. One example that I am particularly excited about is the use of hip-hop to help youth understand, expand, express to erect a better future. Today we are in conversation with the founders of Rhythmic Mind, a Hip-Hop Therapy organization, serving teens and Transitional Age Youth in the greater Bay Area.

Learn More:

- Instagram: @rhythmicmind1

- Donate: www.rhythmicmind.net/donate

- Music: www.rhythmicmind.net/gallery

- Newsletter: bit.ly/33RpaHN

At the root of many social problems communities face the world over, at any scale, lay finances. Our financial services are inefficient, obfuscated and inaccessible. To respond to the pains and constraints we face regarding accessing and using money, a growing cohort of social innovators are building more accessible, fair and transparent financial services.

Today, we learn about a completely decentralized capital market, built on the Ethereum blockchain, called "Maple Finance." Maple lays the groundwork for crypto banks by giving DeFi users access to bond funding fast at low cost, and creating a flexible suite of lending tools for loaners and borrowers.

Learn More:

- Website: https://maple.finance/

- Twitter: @maplefinance

- Medium: https://medium.com/maple-finance

- App: Maple.Loan

What does ownership mean in a digital age? As our lives move more virtual, answering this question becomes very important. Questions of authenticity, of history, and of piracy.

Blockchain technologies inherent transparency, veracity, and decentralized, baked into the infrastructure, make it uniquely applicable to the facilitation of managing, transferring and interacting with your digital possessions. And, of course, you guessed it, someone is out there making that possible right now.

These blockchain projects support a growing universe of something called NTF’s, and I quote, “Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are unique, digital items with blockchain-managed ownership. Examples include collectibles, game items, digital art, event tickets, domain names, and even ownership records for physical assets.”

Today I am talking with the creator of one of the largest marketplace for buying, selling, and discovering rare digital items. I present Devin Finzer, creator of Open Sea.

Learn More:

- Website: https://opensea.io/blog/guides/non-fungible-tokens/

- The Non-Fungible Token Bible: https://opensea.io/blog/guides/non-fungible-tokens/

- Twitter: @OpenSea / @dfinzer

Great work places inspire hope, foment change and are fertile grounds for creative thinking. Great work places and organizations are too far and few in between. Enspiral is changing that by ensuring their clients and partners are practicing effective patterns of collaboration.

As we start this next decade, societies around the world seem to be at an inflection point, and new solutions are needed to the new challenges we face. Old tools and tricks are no longer sufficient.

That is why Enspiral, a network of people working on stuff that matters, with the mission to support people to do the same, strives to make work more humane, more collaborative and more sustainable.

By approaching our work, our passions and one another in novel ways, new solutions can be uncovered, new possibilities unleashed and new patterns created. In this episode, I chat with John Gieryn, Catalyst at Enspiral to explore the what, how and why of the work of Enspiral.

Learn more:

Website - https://enspiral.com/

Twitter - @enspiral / @CoopChange

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/company/enspiral/

There is a rising suit of tools that allow people the world over to begin doing things with their money that has previously been impossible. As blockchain tools begin to grow up, we are seeing a creative explosion of possibilities as people begin to program money.

One tools that we have mentioned a few times in recent episodes is DAI. D.A.I. DAI is a tool from the company, Maker. DAI is a dollar backed token that lets holders of this token make steady and passive gains. rDAI, an offshoot of DAI, was built to give people a chance to automatically allocate accrued interest to a recipient of your choice. In short, this tool makes it possible to accrue and contribute interest from your cash assets.

A very exciting use case of rDAI is being forwarded with charitable ends, and today I am stoked to sit down with Victor of rTrees, a tool that sends your accrued interest to a charity that plants trees. This is just the latest example of how blockchain tech is being used and experimented with to create a more sane, just and sustainable economy.

Learn More:

- Website: rtrees.dappy.dev

- Twitter: @rTreesDapp

- Medium: https://medium.com/@victorrortvedt

The economy is rapidly evolving - we just had the highest highs, followed by unprecedented volatility. This combined with the fact that we enjoy a global workforce, interconnected by interdependent central banking systems, makes all of us vulnerable to the ebbs and flows of economic whims, worries and wonders. In this new economy, workers are more mobile, transitory, have more options and incur more risk than we have become accustomed to. this means we need new tools to support the workers, consultants, freelancers, distributed teams, service providers and vendors who make the important work we do possible. Luckily, a cohort of entrepreneurs are focusing on solving the problems related to supporting the emerging workforce operate in alignment with the realities of modern life.

Today I am talking to Paul, founder of Sablier. This tools makes possible real-time payments (i.e. you to get paid for each interval of work you perform). This means no more waiting around for the 1st and 15th! Sablier is the latest DeFi service, currently being forwarded to create a more just, sane and sustainable economy.

Learn More:

- Website: https://sablier.finance/

- Twitter: @sablierhq

- Twitter: @PaulRBerg

- LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/PaulRBerg/

- Medium: www.medium.com/sablier

Marshall McLuhan once wrote, "We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”

Consider how the internet has shaped reality in less than a quarter century. While human’s are great at creating tools, we have a shockingly poor ability to understand the implication of our tools when the world takes hold of them. I share all this as context as we enter the unknown and race to build tools to solve today’s problems. I continue to find hope and inspiration in the burgeoning blockchain space. People unconstrained by borders, regulations, and technological barriers - building tools to solve some of the largest most fundamental challenges society faces. But as McLuhan warns us, we create tools, then the tools create us. So, today I am excited to enter into a conversation with a blockchain platform that is building their tools with humans at the center - carefully considering the implications and impacts of their tools, not simply building fancy functions and mind boggling buttons.

Today we’re in conversation with Status. Status is a completely open source community, created by contributors all over the world. Developers, designers, creators, educators, hobbyists, enthusiasts, and more – everyone has free and open access to add, edit, review and contribute to the platform. Status strives to be a secure communication tool that upholds human rights, enables community money, forwards community law and through privacy, preserves culture. Join me as we continue our journey, learning about social innovations with Jonny Zerah of Status

Learn More at:

- Twitter: @ethstatus

- Discord: https://discordapp.com/invite/3Exux7Y

- Website: http://status.im/

- Download the App: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.status.ethereum

Sustaining the important work of non-profits is vital to solving the challenges society faces that the "free market" is not incentivized to solve. Innovative solutions that lower the threshold for who can be a philanthropist, and that provide a dependable source of funding for our non-profit partners can fundamentally change how non-profits operate and help them focus on impact, increase their risk tolerance and avoid spending so much damn time throwing fundraisers and justifying their overhead expenses!

To solve the problems our communities face, we need non-profits to innovate, and the current financial and regulatory infrastructure hinders this. Luckily, a new application, Give Together, is providing the infrastructure that can dramatically change how we donate, and how nonprofits can generate funds.

Give Together is a DeFi project bore out of the belief that non-profits are important, that philanthropy is important and that your personal wealth can work for you and your favorite charities, it doesn’t have to be either or. Join me as we continue our DeFi journey with Lucas Kohorst!

Learn More at:

- Twitter: @GiveTogetherApp

- Website: https://givetogether.app/

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucaskohorst/

In the face of this, a new bread of entrepreneur is emerging with the aims of decentralizing financial services and increasing the transparency, autonomy and validity of economic systems. The movement goes by the name, DeFi (as in decentralized finance).

To realize this vision of decentralizing central banks and their bevvy of obfuscated services, a new relationship with data is required. The new relationship with data finds its foundation in blockchains, and it is now time to begin taking this technology serious. In the coming weeks, I am taking a deep dive into the exciting world of DeFi as this will likely be the first space that blockchain technology begins to impact the masses, and improve society en mass.

Today I sit down with the lead of Zero Collateral, a protocol for decentralized lending. Through this platform, which is built on the Ethereum blockchain, anyone has the opportunity to become a lender or borrower. This is a way for people to secure short-term loans and be the collateralized of these loans. This model has the potential to decrease the financial burden of short-term loans, decrease the barriers of accessing a loan, and allowing anyone with capital to provide a safe loan, make some interest on their money along the way.

Learn More at:

- Twitter: @Zer0Collateral

- Website: https://zerocollateral.com/

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-berkun-47a61a10b/

Media has always played a pivotal role in shifting the patterns we seek to change. New stories help cultures shift behaviors, patterns and potentially bring about long-sought-after changes.

So how can we shift the narratives around some of our most entrenched social ills? Two innovators are working on that. In this episode, we meet Eric Ortiz, a journalist, and Chaumtoli Huq, a lawyer and much more. These two have created a newsroom unlike any other and are striving to elevate the stories of the most marginalized. In this conversation, we hear the how, why and what of this bottom-up approach to shifting narratives.

Learn more about these innovators and their efforts:

Law @ The Margins - lawatthemargins.com/

Community Based News Room (CBNR): https://lawatthemargins.com/category/community-based-news-room-cbnr/

CBNR: Help Us Tell More Social Justice Stories - www.gofundme.com/f/community-based-news-room

Chaumtoli Huq - www.linkedin.com/in/chaumtoli-huq-57399517/

Eric Ortiz - https://www.linkedin.com/in/erictortiz/