MonkeyTree.Community
MonkeyTree is an online platform that empowers grassroots initiatives by connecting ideas and challenges to one another as well as to already established impact drivers such as individuals, NGOs, social initiatives, and even Municipalities, Universities and Businesses. Our aim is it to overcome the lack of overview, connection and interaction between all key player that strive for transformative positive social change from the bottom up. Today, political, social and environmental issues are more transnational than ever. These commonly very abstract challenges often seem intangible and overwhelming to the people who, exactly because of that reason, intensively focus on the things that are truly relevant within their immediate environment - hence, global issues remain for others to solve. Yet, thinking about the concept of the word ‘global’, we come to understand that it in fact means nothing more but the overall collection of ‘local’. With the power of local bottom-up projects thought up by the everyday mind global change is possible and abstract issues become tangible solutions. Throughout 4 years of intensive research in the sectors of non-profit, charity, local governments, direct citizen engagement and bottom-up initiatives as well as the intensive study of behavioural psychology, politics, societal structures and transformative change we created the concept for a platform that unites and empowers positive change. Here, we want to bring small initiatives, ideas, challenges, projects, and key actors under one roof and facilitate the exchange between them. MonkeyTree has been designed to provide an impact toolkit that people need to get from an encountered challenge to a specific project - creating a change-maker community that unites in their common vision (to make our world a better place), no matter from which cultural background. MonkeyTree is not for the everyday hero – creatively translating global challenges into local initiatives by bringing people together - not just with each other but also with key actors. How do we want to achieve our goal? - We have more than four years of experience, research on our back. - We know what kind of environment we need to create to foster all target groups. - We have tested the idea offline throughout many workshops with locals, organisations and initiators of all kind and organised a big festival last October (2015) which received enormous positive feedback from NGOs, locals and students and initiated more than three new initiatives in the city. - We have local partner organisations and enthusiasts who are just waiting for us to go online in several cities across the country. Mainly NGOs who would like to connect more to citizen initiatives are desperately looking for a place that brings them all together and provides the tools that motivates individuals to keep their ideas up to date, connect them to others or share their challenges because they can see where they are taken. - We have a clever team of developers and designers waiting to get started and who calculated the total projects costs to about 50.000 Euro. The first phase, in which we want to build a an interactive online map will run to a total of 100 hours of programming and design, which means that we are able to get a head start with an estimate of 5.000 Euro. This first version will allow people (and organisations - like NGOs, the Public Library, and even the University) to: 1) share ideas, challenges, or projects 2) comment on them, 3) up-vote them, 4) link them to other ideas, challenges, projects, organisations, or people 5) create their own 'Change-Maker Profile', where they can not just show their friends what ideas they shared or projects they joined but also share their skills, knowledge and expertise so that other projects or organisations can connect to that. 6) everything will be categorised and searchable via #tags 7) ideas, projects, people and organisations can be followed in order to stay up to date about what is happening to something that had been shared within our impact community 8) groups can be created in which people with like-minded interest can get together and discuss, be it around a #organisation, #subject or #project 9) also meetings can be scheduled in order to meet people offline and discuss around certain #ideas, #challenges or #projects 10) ...