Project summary

Exceptional self-organizing movements, from historical rescue networks to ecological-regeneration movements, share a single underlying grammar: the same logic that organizes families, tribes, and nations. I want to make that grammar explicit and test whether it can be encoded into infrastructure: a currency whose worth is intrinsic, grounded in how much a movement regenerates relative to what its participants invest, and governed by participants' ongoing choice to stay rather than by who can buy in. The aim is new democratic infrastructure for value, not a token to speculate on.

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

The core goal is to build technical infrastructure that makes the multicapital flows of self-organizing movements — financial, relational, cultural, and ecological capital — legible, verifiable, and revenue-generating at scale. Concretely, this means developing a unit of account that measures the ratio of socioecological value generated to time invested by a movement's participants, and a network architecture that tracks, verifies, and routes that value back to the communities producing it.

The path to achieving it runs through the Tarun Bharat Sangh (India) as a live laboratory, structured as seven rigorously gated phases that move from narrative to data to architecture to interface to live deployment.

This request would fund the second phase of the research: multicapital fieldwork at scale plus a natural-capital baseline, pilot collection across 30+ nurseries.

The following steps would be to scale to 100+ nurseries, backend architecture development, governance encoding, an interface build with natural-capital integration, controlled live testing, and finally live deployment under TBS governance.

Each phase has a defined gate condition and progression is contingent on TBS approval at each gate. The methodology is participatory action research, with tools co-designed and verified with TBS members rather than built externally and validated after the fact.

How will this funding be used?

I am seeking roughly $30,000 for the next phase. Expenses include: fieldwork with Tarun Bharat Sangh and their water councils in Rajasthan, India, co-designing and testing the data-collection tools with participants, and building a natural-capital baseline (remote sensing plus on-the-ground water and ecological indicators) that links the capital invested to what the movement regenerates and sustains. Revenue to date has been self-funded research alongside in-kind movement partnerships. This grant would fund the phase outright. The phase is gated, so it proceeds only on results the participants themselves verify.

Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?

I have developed this work since 2016 and now treat it as my primary focus. I completed phase one, "narrative foraging," with the Green Belt Movement in Kenya and Tarun Bharat Sangh in India. This phase was designed to identify narrative evidence of self-organizing dynamics and to explore how abstract concepts like novelty, autonomy, anticipation, and synergy are expressed in local terms. I hold a working partnership with the Green Belt Movement and an active fieldwork relationship with Tarun Bharat Sangh, and I am in early conversations with several mission-aligned networks and funders.

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

The legible multicapital patterns found in Nyeri County turn out to be an artifact of initial field conditions rather than a stable structural signature, i.e., the diagnostic doesn't hold at scale.

A loss of participant trust or movements' withdrawal: because progression is gated on movement's approval at every stage, the project simply stops if communities don't endorse a phase's outputs.

If the project fails, things remain as they are. Like most externally funded environmental programs, they leaves little operational legacy once support ends. In the case of the Green Belt Movement, ~10% of nurseries remained operational 15 years after the last active funding cycle (which is considered exceptionally good in terms of environmental programs).

How much money have you raised in the last 12 months, and from where?

Self-funded so far.