This week in collaboration with Aya Miyaguchi and Common Unity Project Aotearoa (Common Unity) we launched the Rātā Rangatahi Fund. The fund is designed to run alongside the Rātā Rangatahi Programme - a summer holiday programme offering rangatahi (youth) opportunities to be immersed in local food production, climate healing, and community development. Check out the short promo video below to learn more.

The Rātā Rangatahi Fund

The Rātā Rangatahi Fund has been seeded with a generous personal donation by Aya Myaguchi, Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation. During her visit to New Zealand earlier this year as part of the Edmund Hillary Fellowship, Aya became acquainted with The Wellbeing Protocol project. Recognising the immense potential of this initiative to harness decentralised technology for the betterment of underprivileged segments of society, Aya made a personal contribution to the project. Her support reflects a belief in the transformative power of blockchain and decentralised solutions to drive positive social change.

This is a huge vote of confidence and endorsement of the innovative approach taken by Common Unity and The Wellbeing Protocol that gives a voice to Rangatahi to help fund real-world opportunities.”

Kevin Whitmore, Business Innovation Advisor - Web3, Callaghan Innovation

The fund has been designed to give youth a voice in decision making. All participating rangatahi will have autonomy to allocate the fund towards projects aligned with the programme. The fund will be distributed via our new Web 3 inspired Participatory Grantmaking Tool. The tool is designed to support them to come to a collective decision, enable a transparent and fair process and allow for simple reporting of outcomes.

Public donations welcome

A key feature of the fund is that we are welcoming public donations. 100% of your donation (less payment processor fees) will go directly into the fund for the rangatahi to spend. If you would like to donate you can do so via debit or credit card here. If you’d like to donate to the fund via crypto please email info@thewellbeingprotocol.org. You can follow the progress of this project via the Common Unity social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok & Linkedin)

If you like the work we are doing and would like to support the project, learn how here.

And lastly a shoutout to other partners Nuku Ora, Nikau Foundation, and Callaghan Innovation for supporting us to operationalise the fund.