Placeflow: Community-Led Futures

We have all the solutions we need for better, community-led futures.  We just lack the organization and coordination to implement them.

Placeflow is a tool for people to coordinate and shape better long-term outcomes in their communities.  It’s an online tool, to bring people together offline, and build 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 community investment.

Placeflow is a future self-organized by communities — with resilience, capacity, and local power — in the U.S. and places around the world.

Placeflow addresses the following problem: Communities lacking the tools to coordinate, organize, and shape the future of the places they live.

This problem is pervasive, across the wealth spectrum, affecting both wealthy and underprivileged communities.

However, the problems disproportionately affect communities with less resources — who have more urgent desires for better futures (e.g. better economic opportunities, healthier local environments, better education and recreation, stronger infrastructure), less opportunity and capital to manifest these changes, and are more vulnerable to extractive dynamics (e.g. gentrification, rentseeking) due to less generational wealth and home ownership.

To reiterate, our lack of civic engagement around the futures of the places we live affects almost every developed community in the world, and all of the people (plus future inhabitants) in those communities.

Given levels of wealth stratification, we expect that this affects 80% of people — across boundaries and sectors — in the United States.  With accelerating wealth inequality, this disproportionate lack of empowerment could affect 90% of people in the United States by 2030.

Placeflow is built to give all of these people an active, capable tool, to start taking initiative of the places they live — and put their skills, knowledge, and personal resilience, towards meaningful new opportunities.

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 project costs and savings 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

* Gentrification and the acquisition of our neighborhood homes by financial investors

* 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.

There is no reason why we need to be stuck with these outcomes.

We have possibilities to develop community resilience (e.g. food, water, energy, housing, air quality), improve our local economies, and take control of the future of the places we call home.

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

We have the power, capacity, knowledge,  resources, and even capital, to create new Greenwood Districts in communities around the country.

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 communities 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-focused organizations (e.g. Sunrise, Inter-American Development Bank, worker cooperatives) and resilience leaders in these communities (e.g. Minneapolis, Boston, DC, USVI, 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 community investment — it makes community-led development 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 communities that use it.

Catalyzing civic engagement and enabling communities to determine their own development/ownership patterns.

This is exactly what Placeflow does, for communities around the U.S., in collaboration with local organizations and networks — and with an aligned funding model to raise capital for these initiatives.

Opportunities for equitable jobs, credit, and generational wealth in communities of color.

These improvements come with communities shaping their own futures.  Just look at the Greenwood District — a thriving community with jobs, credit, and wealth —  developed more than a century ago (and rebuilt thereafter).

Placeflow helps communities create these opportunities themselves, with access to capital and resources.

Placeflow is a live application, that is currently being tested with communities (e.g. citizens, local businesses), organizations (e.g. development organizations, resilience networks), and commercial partners (e.g. sustainable technologies, which can supply services to communities).

Pilots are being discussed with several of these partners — including affordable and resilient 3D-printed homes for underserved communities, and disaster recovery projects in the U.S. Virgin Islands — 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 demand
(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 life in communities across the U.S. and the planet.

People actively exploring ways to improve their communities and shape their future lives — 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 community 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 the communities themselves.

In short, community-led futures.

Many projects are aimed at *individual* transformation (like changing eating habits, or buying an electric car).

These individual projects are missing the power of local networks, scale economics, community participation, and aligned capital.

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

In five years, Placeflow will be serving thousands of communities, 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.

Placeflow's indicators include:

* Rates of mental health, depression, and diseases of despair (e.g. opioid addiction) in active communities.  By providing avenues for people to come together, and take productive actions towards improving their own futures and the futures of the places around them, it is anticipated that this could have a strong positive effect on mental health and personal wellbeing.

* Times spent in transit (e.g. commutes, grocery shopping, school) in active communities.  With community-led development, greater resilience, and improved local opportunities, it is expected that communities will be able to spend less time going *elsewhere* — because more will be available in the places they live.  From job opportunities, to food, to education and recreation.

* Resilience to financial emergencies in active communities.  By lowering costs of living through community-driven infrastructure, and creating new opportunities for jobs and wealth creation, it is anticipated that Placeflow will help communities move away from poverty risks and develop resiliency to financial shocks.

* Environmental regeneration in active communities.  Many of the transitions that can improve life in our communities, are also in harmony with environmental regeneration.  Community gardens for food abundance.  Water retention processes to increase water access, and reduce erosion and the impacts of natural disasters.  Local supply chains and economies, to reduce the carbon footprint of long commutes and international products.  Improving air quality, through clean and local mobility solutions.

1 full-time staff

Placeflow is applying to Solve to discover opportunities for collaboration, and connect with community-driven organizations, in order to scale Placeflow's impact — both deepening its engagement with communities, and spreading to new communities.

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 community organizations 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.

Human Capital / Product + Service Distribution / Technology

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 community 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 community 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 citizens, communities, organizations, and partners — potentially, those outside of the MIT Solve network — who could be interested in developing community-led futures 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 impact as well.

- Mission-aligned organizations, to develop pilots and community 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 serve real-world communities

- 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 work, and Placeflow can create more impactful opportunities for communities to explore.

One of Placeflow's principal impact metrics is improving the mental health and wellbeing of people in engaged communities, by providing opportunities for new futures and constructive collaboration.

Likewise, by improving communities according to the benefits of the people who live in them, Placeflow will also improve the physical health and wellbeing of engaged communities — cleaner air and water, healthier local food, and more local + vibrant ways of living.

Placeflow will put the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Prize directly towards community-led projects, with our community investment model, to start experimenting and learning and helping communities shape better outcomes.  Placeflow would also collaborate with the Robert Wood Johnson for guidance and insight in the implementation of this work.

Placeflow enables local stakeholders — including schools and students — to engage in local projects and experiments.

This is a strong opportunity for local project-based education, which is accessible to classrooms in primary and secondary schools all across the U.S. (and enables connection and collaboration with schools in other countries, as well).

Placeflow will use the ASA Prize for Equitable Education to work with educators, schools, and education organizations, and create programs for project-based education through our tool.  Furthermore, Placeflow will work with ASA to provide funding for those student-led projects, with our community investment model, so learners can see the real impact and influence they can have over their own local futures.

An antiracist and equitable future is a future led and shaped by our communities — and the people that make up our communities.

That is the outcome that Placeflow is focused on.

With the Elevate Prize, Placeflow would provide funding and capital for community-led projects with our community investment model, to start empowering people on the ground — and showing the world what community-led futures can look like.  Placeflow would also collaborate with the Elevate Prize Foundation on the implementation of this work, and explore how to make it scalable + accessible to communities around the world.

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

It could also have a strong impact for digital literacy, by showing people what's possible through digital tools — and the high-capacity ways they can engage — while still being a simple + accessible tool, that people with less digital literacy can still understand and engage with.

For example, by showing people the possibilities of dynamic modeling interfaces like Placeflow's economic model, that could vastly improve digital literacy — both for people who have significant digital experience already (by expanding their horizon of possibilities), and for people who have less digital experience, by providing them with more capable and intuitive tools.

In short, through accessibility and a human focus, Placeflow will help all users — regardless of their digital experience — be able to reach similar insights and have a shared understanding.

With the HP Prize, Placeflow will work with HP and other organizations to ensure digital literacy is a part of our platform and experience, and directly fund projects  for digital inclusion and economic opportunity — led by communities themselves.

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

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

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

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.