Honey Badges: Revolutionising Charity with a DAO

Yeah. So I wanted to revolutionize the charity space, as I said with the COVA project, I run a traditional charity.

I know how that works. It’s brilliant.

It does great work, but it has to play by the rules at all times. And sometimes impact shouldn’t play by the rules because in order to be truly impactful and help the most vulnerable people, you have to work around systems, not with systems.

So I was excited to get into web three for honey badges because I saw so much potential to do incredible good outside of the constraints of working in the charity world. So we launched Honey Badges.

It was an NFT project in the image of the fierce, resilient and fearless honey badger, which is an animal that truly has no equal. It will take on a male lion, it will take on anything.

And it’s 2ft tall and has the shortest legs you’ve ever seen. So I like that spirit.

So that’s why we are the honey badges and badge with an ES, like a badge of honor, not necessarily the animal. And basically what we did was we sold our NFT, we had 800 people buy it, and then with those funds we did three things.

We did events, we paid all of our team and our artists and everyone and made sure that we were actually running a functioning business. And we did grants and the grants were change maker grants where anyone around the world could apply for them.

We didn’t want to put any, again, confines on what you had to be doing to apply. You just had to be making the world a better place, and it had to be nonprofit led.

It couldn’t be profitable to you. And basically, we have had hundreds on hundreds of applicants come through and say, I want to build a school in a refugee center where I live.

I don’t have any registered NGO. I’m not a registered CBO.

I just want to get some bricks and build the school. Can you fund me?

And we have a Dow leadership team of ten people who vet all of those applications to make sure the person is who they say they are. So ID checks and then just proof that they’ve done similar things in the past or that they’ve got the capacity to actually execute on what they’re proposing.

And then of all of those applications each month, we put them to the Dow of 800 people. Everybody votes.

Whichever project gets the most votes is the project that gets funded. And it’s a very kind of fun structure to be experimenting loosely with that Dow structure of, like, I don’t get to make a decision.

Like, I created Honey badges, but I think only once the project that I’ve voted for has won.