The OpenGrants Theory of Change

The UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development outlines 17 major goals for the world. If you are unfamiliar, you can review the agenda here https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda.

If you are a founder considering raising capital via equity crowdfunding, here are some things you should know.

Recently, I leveraged Wefunder to raise capital for our startup, and one of my biggest takeaways was that focusing on the capital alone misses the main opportunity of a community raise.

OpenGrants Today and in the Near Future

Our partners include visionaries at the frontiers of technology, product experts, and veteran operators in the government consulting space.

This is the Future of Grant Funding

There’s a common concept in business—that for large organizations, new ideas only succeed from the outside in. They must be developed outside of the “immune system” of the organization, then introduced after they’ve been developed enough to show promise.

@opengrants_io Vision and Mission OpenGrants envisions a world where people are empowered with access to simple, fair, grant funding. Our mission is to deploy modern financial infrastructure to support efficient, equitable, and transparent grant funding processes.

The OpenGrants software platform and network of users—and the data generated by them—unlocks new levels of communication, insight, and targeted action between funders and applicants.

What Went Wrong? Part 2: Inequity

There are a variety of discrimination and bias issues in the public sector’s innovation funding ecosystem. Some of these issues are the product of decades of systemic bias including racism, while others have developed over time through bureaucratic bloat and other shortcomings.

What Went Wrong With Grants? Part 1: Waste

While many grant programs exist, most have become victims of bureaucratic bloat and private interest issues. Additionally, many of the grant funding ecosystems were designed with the funders in mind, with little thought given to the end users.

Why Grant funding? The World’s Most Important Capital While it’s rarely discussed outside of specific circles, grant funding is the most important capital vehicle in the world. Most of the core technology used in your phone was originally developed with grant funding.

While most capital seeks to minimize risk, grant funding has been proven as an effective tool for taking on the work of researching and developing solutions that will push humanity forward.

$GRANT thread :) OpenGrants believes in the future of #stakeholdercapitalism. We want to open up the opportunity to invest for everyone in our community

We believe the work we’re doing at @opengrants_io is imperative for strengthening democracy and solving its challenges of equity, global competitiveness and innovation.

Generally speaking, as our government has grown, it has imposed additional regulations and restrictions. We’ll leave a pros-and-cons discussion for another time and focus here on the impact this has had on grant funding for innovation and research.

This multi-billion dollar ecosystem has been handed more than 110 new federal rules in the last few decades, and the regulation continues to grow in complexity. Large funding ecosystems at the state level face similar challenges.