rodrigodavies

Earlier this week I gave a talk at Stanford’s Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society, publishers of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, on civic crowdfunding. I was excited to share how my research into crowd-based community finance has evolved, and how Neighborly‘s launch this summer will make impact investing a local reality for […]

For the past couple of years I’ve been thinking about how to bring the energy, potential and ambition of donation/reward crowdfunding to community development and civic engagement. I was lucky to be an early employee of Spacehive, one of the first movers in the space, I put together the first […]

Last month at the Media Lab, Helena, Jen, Michaela and I organized Build Peace, a conference to bring together practitioners from the worlds of peacebuilding and technology to talk about how the two fields could work together. It was an incredibly enlightening and generative three days, and before the first […]

Today I’m capping two years of studying the emergence of civic crowdfunding by submitting my master’s thesis to the MIT archives. Great thanks are due to the wonderful collaborators I’ve had the privilege of working with. I won’t name everyone here, but all of you folks will find your names in the […]

There’s a tradition in Peru called the pollada – literally, a chicken party. These parties perform a very important social function. Say I’m about to have a child and I’m worried about how I’m going to pay education or healthcare bills. I hold a pollada to raise money by inviting friends and […]