Placeflow: Community-Led Futures

We have all the solutions we need for resilient ecosystems and natural regeneration.  Often, we're just lacking the organization and coordination to implement them.

Placeflow is a tool for people to initiate these projects and bring them to live.  It’s an online tool, to bring people together offline, and steward the future of the places they live, work, play, and love.

Placeflow makes it simple to start new local initiatives, and for local stakeholders to join and bring new capacity to the table.

When we undertake these projects together — pooling out interests, pooling our capacity, and increasing the scale — they can become affordable, feasible, and even pay for themselves. And in cases where we need more capital, Placeflow is providing non-extractive funding models for solutions. Placeflow is stewardship self-organized by communities — with resilience, capacity, and local power — in ecosystems around the world.

Placeflow aggregates local resilient ecosystem efforts — providing a tool to raise capital, capacity, and coordination, and bring these projects to life.

Few communities around the world are truly sustainable — less, regenerative — in terms of alignment with local ecosystems while providing economic opportunity.

The scale and pace of the problem is immense.  We're developing new communities the size of Paris every 5 days.  A football field's worth of forest is being cleared while you read this.  Plastic waste is cascading into our streams and oceans.  This affects 7 billion people around the world, and will affect many more in the future.

The faster we build, these outcomes will only accelerate

Unless we change the paradigm.

If we understand how we need to change, to support our ecosystems and create sustainable economic opportunities — why isn't it happening yet?

Because these changes can't be made as individuals.  They require holistic perspectives of our communities and our ways of life, and coordinated efforts to shape new, regenerative futures.

That's what Placeflow is built for, in addition to providing the capital + capacity to make regenerative futures a reality.

Placeflow is a digital tool, which offers the ability to select specific communities on a global map, explore project templates, create new projects, and share them with the world.

Local stakeholders can join projects, share comments + feedback, identify project requests,  and provide specific offers for support.

And groups can tinker with the economics of these projects, to understand the impacts of greater community participation.

It uses a GIS interface (Mapbox) to select and render local communities, a backend Postgres database to store projects and related data (e.g. participants, offers, contributions), and a front-end UI/UX to display this data in an intuitive way and make it simple to engage with (e.g. for creating projects, detailing projects, joining projects, sharing offers, exploring locations, modeling impacts at different levels of scale)

Placeflow is built for people like you and me — whoever you are, whatever your background, wherever your from, and no matter how much is in your bank account. We all need tools to shape better outcomes in the places we live, and all of our communities need to make sustainable transitions, because our problems are connected. The ways we can commonly be underserved include:

* A lack of voice / participation in the development of our own neighborhoods

* Rising costs of living and a lack of affordability

* Worsening air, water, and food quality, with these threats set to increase every year

* Worsening economic mobility, and more of us living in or ever closer to financial emergencies

* A meaning crisis, and diseases of despair — in part, due to a lack of connection and empowerment in the places around us.

* An utter lack of recovery and rebuilding in the places that need it most, like post-disaster U.S. Virgin Islands, and in communities affected by COVID across the U.S.

* Environmental extraction and degradation in communities around the world, which have lacked alternatives and methods for sourcing sustainable economic opportunity ....

... Until now

We have possibilities to develop ecosystem resilience, improve our local economies, and steward the future of the places we call home.

We see, hear, and are inspired by examples of communities + ecosystems doing just this every day.

But we can't do it as individuals and in silos.

We need to coordinate and organize to shape these futures — and if we do, our futures can take any shape we desire.

As the founder of Placeflow, I'm learning about the problems, needs, and possibilities through research.  I'm also engaging with community and environmental organizations (e.g. Sunrise, Inter-American Development Bank), and resilience leaders in the environmental locations (e.g. U.S. Virgin Islands, Indigenous territories) — who have the best experience, knowledge, and proximity to what's happening on the ground, and can bring together diverse perspectives to advise on capacities that are needed most.

Placeflow is built for these contexts — and combined with models for to raise non-extractive, long-term aligned capital — it makes ecosystem initiatives actionable.  Today.

All of this comes from looking at the long-term outcomes we desire — and working backwards, to understand what we need to reach those better futures, and what values and processes we need to have in place. For that reason, Placeflow is fully aligned with — and built for — the long-term outcomes of the places that use it.

Create scalable economic opportunities for local communities, including fishing, timber, tourism, and regenerative agriculture, that are aligned with thriving and biodiverse ecosystems

This is exactly what Placeflow does — except, it allows communities to create + self-organize these opportunities for themselves.  While providing support, capital, and capacity.

Aggregate local projects to enable access to financial capital for ecosystem services such as natural hazard mitigation, water quality, and carbon storage.

This is also a fundamental function of Placeflow.  Select a locality, and you immediately view an aggregation of local projects — with access to reliable, non-extractive capital, through our community investment model.

Placeflow is a live application, that is currently being tested with communities (e.g. local citizens), organizations (e.g. development organizations, resilience networks), and partners (e.g. nature-based solutions and ecosystem services).

Pilots are being discussed with several of these partners, with the possibility of funding through the non-extractive community investment model.

Placeflow's innovation comes from a focus on: 

 (a) Local coordination and capacity 

(b) Scale economics, by aggregating local projects 

(c) Non-extractive funding for community investment

(d) Making it simple to start and organize local initiatives 

By bringing these possibilities into our worldview, it could completely change outcomes for ecosystems across the world.

People actively exploring ways to improve their surroundings and shape their futures — through environmental, economic, and social lenses — while having the capacity and resources to bring these changes to life.

Furthermore, the non-extractive funding model could create a new status quo for ecosystem investment.  Once people understand the benefits and resilience of this funding model, it could shift billions in capital (much of which, is currently losing value due to negative interest rates) towards useful new initiatives — as determined by communities themselves. In short, community-led resilience.

In one year, Placeflow will be serving hundreds of communities and ecosystems, representing hundreds of thousands of stakeholders.

In five years, Placeflow will be serving thousands of communities and ecsoystem, representing millions of stakeholders.

Since the focus is on communities, Placeflow will directly and meaningfully affect — and actually, be driven by — all of the members of those communities. and ecosystems.

Placeflow's indicators include:

* Environmental conservation + regeneration in active ecosystems (e.g. lower deforestation rates, lessening pollution, more rewilding activities)

* Local economic activity, with local producers and trade, to reduce the need for ecosystem extraction and unsustainable supply chains

* Number of total ecosystems that local communities are engaging with, and the area that these ecosystems cover

1 full-time staff

Placeflow is applying to Solve to discover opportunities for collaboration, and connect with environmental organizations, in order to scale Placeflow's impact — both deepening its engagement with communities + active ecosystems, and also spreading to new places.

The mentorship, peer Solvers, and Solve network would also be invaluable in accelerating Placeflow's impact — through their input, perspectives, camaraderie, partnerships, and their own respective networks.

Of course, the exposure to Placeflow would also be a big wind in the sails — not only to help more communities and environmental stewards learn about Placeflow, but to help them learn about the ideas powering Placeflow as well.

So through that exposure, if other organizations learn about the non-extractive community investment model we're using, it would be a major impact for those organizations to start using similar investment models as well.

Placeflow's founder, Sam Butler, is currently the only person working full-time on the project.

Placeflow has a strong network of informal advisers and participants, from diverse backgrounds and perspectives, but no one else is yet involved in the day-to-day building and operations.

Placeflow could use additional human capital to create more opportunities, partnerships, and community involvement — while at the same time, continuing to improve the software and better refine the tool's possibilities (e.g. improving UX/UI, better data visualizations, scaling the technical architecture, new ways to communicate and engage)

Sam has the experience and capacity to work on both project development and software, but if he's working on any one task, there isn't anybody else to pick up another (yet.)

Legal / Regulatory

On topics surrounding personal data, legal advice would be valuable to Placeflow.

Likewise, Placeflow's ecosystem investment model involves innovative uses of existing legal structures (e.g. LLCs), and it would be helpful to have legal / regulatory support while making this model more accessible to communities, to ensure all is done the right way.

Public Relations

For connecting with new stewards, communities, organizations, and partners — potentially, those outside of the MIT Solve network — who could be interested in developing ecosystem resilience projects with Placeflow.

Monitoring / Evaluation

Placeflow would like to work with organizations who have experience in measuring impact, to improve its own outlook, and incorporate these perspectives into the software itself — enabling users to better deliver environmental impacts as well.

- Mission-aligned organizations, to develop pilots and environmental programs together, and help them achieve outcomes with the Placeflow software

- MIT community, to bring in key perspectives and insights from research and experience around the world — to both inform the big picture possibilities of Placeflow, and how to better refine the tool to ecosystems on the ground

- Any Solve Members who could help increase their impact using Placeflow.  This would be mutually beneficial — other Solve Members get more opportunities to engage with communities around their ecosystem work, and Placeflow can offer more impactful opportunities for communities to implement in their local environments.

Placeflow is a tool to help communities shape their own futures, led by the people in those communities, including refugees.

Placeflow provides a tool for refugees to have a greater voice in the development of their new communities, to foster greater resilience and outcomes in their own daily lives, by collaborating and working together with others in the community — fostering togetherness through hands-on work.

Long before the outcomes, this would immediately improve integration in new communities for refugees, while also providing near-term opportunities for job prospects and self-reliance.

With the Andan Prize, Placeflow would focus on community engagement and technical development with the Andan Foundation and other refugee organizations, to ensure that this tool + opportunity is both accessible and empowering for them.  Placeflow would also use funding from the Andan Prize to provide capital for refugee-led projects, with the guidance of the Andan Foundation, to ensure refugee voices truly are heard in the shaping of our collective futures.

One of Placeflow's major areas of impact is helping communities become safer and more sustainable — in large part, through technology and local applications of science + engineering (e.g. local supply chains, nature regeneration projects)

Placeflow will use the GM Prize to directly fund community and ecosystem projects with our community investment model, and collaborate with General Motors to experiment and learn from these real-world activities and the power of our communities.

Placeflow is a tool for all members of the ecosystems we serve, regardless of age, gender, or any other traits.

Placeflow gives women and girls a greater voice in the development of their local environments, along with the capital + capacity to take action towards those futures.

With the Women Prize, Placeflow would directly fund ecosystem projects led by women and girls in local communities, with our community investment model, in collaboration with organizations and institutions (like the Vodafone Americas Foundation) who have on-the-ground experience bringing these projects to life.

With Placeflow, local communities are empowered to improve monitoring and eliminate illegal fishing/labor through coordination and shared capacity, while also creating better economic alternatives for the people that call that place home.

With the Minderoo Prize, Placeflow would work directly with the Minderoo Foundation, to identify key locations where we must address overfishing — and then, to provide capital + resources to communities on the ground in those locations, so they can start delivering outcomes and bringing better futures into reality.

In the process, Placeflow would also make these solutions replicable — so they could be similar adopted, funded, and implemented, by any community looking end overfishing around the world.

With Placeflow, local communities are empowered to absorb carbon through ecosystem services and nature-based solutions, and decarbonize their ways of life through neighborhood-scale transitions.  This is done through local connection and coordination — and in the process, solutions are replicable, enabling them to be shared, adopted, and implemented, in any other communities around the world.

With the ServiceNow Prize, Placeflow would fund carbon sequestration and decarbonization projects led by communities — and show people around the world how these models for community investment and connected local change can make the world better, in every community.

Placeflow is built on GIS data, including intuitive identification of communities at the appropriate scale, and is in the process of incorporating more forms of local data to help guide local decisionmaking.

Ultimately, when you select a community on Placeflow, you should be able to see the most important data about what's happening in your community — trends across nature, economics, health, wellbeing — so you can focus your attention on what is most important to you.

Placeflow would use the AI for Humanity Prize to work with community-focused data scientists, and enable us to start incorporating localized data much more quickly, while building an inclusive + open data foundation — that will enable people to freely share data with Placeflow, and others to make productive use of this data as well —  through collaboration and guidance from organizations like the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation.

In short, the AI for Humanity Prize would be a significant catalyst in enabling Placeflow to be an intelligent, augmentative tool for communities and people around the world.

Placeflow is expected to make a strong impact on inclusion and economic opportunity, by empowering communities and the people that shape them.

This is a strong opportunity for local project-based education, which is accessible to classrooms in primary and secondary schools all across the world — and further, enables connection and collaboration with schools across distances as well.

In the process, Placeflow enables communities to shape their own futures — tackling their own most pressing issues — including local economic opportunity, and sustainable futures.

With the GSR Prize, Placeflow would directly fund pressing community initiatives using our innovative community investment model, to start learning and shaping futures — as led by the communities themselves.  Placeflow would also work with GSR to understand how innovative approaches could support and improve outcomes on the ground.