Name of Project
Parallelo
Proposal overview
A traditional approach to helping financially disadvantaged communities is to retrain their members to undertake low-income jobs. This so-called solution increases the already significant financial gap between the dominant elite and the working class in most conditions. Here we challenge that method and propose to improve the overall aggregated value of the community work by making crypto revenue models accessible to less privileged members of society.
Parallelo
The Parallelo project is an initiative that seeks to increase the financial value generated by a community without imposing a significant change to its lifestyle.
Environment
Tibau do Sul in the state of Rio Grande do Norte is a famous touristic destination in Brazil for both local and foreign visitors. The fourteen thousand people living in the town are spread across a handful of villages that include paradisiac beaches such as Praia da Pipa and Sibauma. Despite its beauty and economic potential, the city suffers from a chronic problem of wealth distribution, with a large portion of the population leaning towards poverty. These conditions help perpetuate the scenario of further exploitation as economically vulnerable members of the community must accept low wages to work in local businesses as their only source of income.
Untapped resources
One of the most unexplored resources in the Tibau do Sul community is the creative artwork generated daily by local, emergent artists and everyday people. A few initiatives that tried to tap into that wealth ran into distribution, advertising, and transparency problems. Another major problem is market saturation as they compete for local buyers only, which significantly depreciates the overall value of the artwork.
Marketing local artwork globally.
Here we propose implementing a project to harvest the economic potential of the hidden talents in Tibau do Sul. Briefly, we will build a channel where local establish and emergent artists can market their products globally using non-fungible tokens (NFT) in crypto networks.
To bridge the knowledge gap needed to build and market an NFT, we will train and support community members to learn how to digitize and create NFT from the artwork generated. This person will be responsible for interacting with the artists and adapting solutions to create NFTs for the diverse art formats.
Revenue model and sustainability
The ultimate goal is to expose these artworks from Tibau do Sul to global crypto markets, which will be a source of income for the artists and a generator of resources for future community-building projects managed by Parallelo. In particular, some of the much-needed projects towards children’s education, recycling infrastructure, and more.
For this pilot, we propose the following division of the revenue value of the artwork:
- 90% to the author of the work
- 5% to support the developer
- 2.5% to support the community project the author might be involved
- 2.5% to help seed other Parallelo’s projects
Team
Parallelo’s team has two core members that coordinate and execute its actions. These members have expertise in resource management, data analysis, and complex problem-solving techniques. For this project, we will bring on board a developer at a minimum and a filmmaker that will work together to capture scenic art generated by the community.
Conclusion and future work
This pilot project is the very first that intersects Parallelo’s hands-on approach to problem-solving in real-world disadvantaged communities and the crypto world. It bridges the knowledge gap between local artists and the technology needed by bringing local developers to communicate with the artists. The ultimate goal is to capture financial value from the crypto revolution to increase the aggregated value generated by the community. This will change the market forces that drive low wages in the less privileged segment of the population of Tibau do Sul by adding an alternative source of income. This initiative is only the beginning of a more extended plan to evolve Parallelo into a full ParalleloDAO where funds will be distributed to local projects according to governance voting. We will spin similar initiatives in other communities in Brazil and other developing countries in the future.
Proposal ask
$10k
Metrics for success
In three months, we expect:
- To train the developer responsible for shepherding the project and directly interacting with the community.
- To make at least one NFT from a local artwork
- To build a single-page website that will display information about the project and access to the NFT gallery in the marketplace.
