Real-life impact, one NFT at a time
Laura François, founder of Actually People, talks about creating positive social impact
Laura’s interest in social impact sprouts from the years she spent living in South Asia, working in the domain of human rights, and looking at fashion as its storytelling tool. That work made her see the interconnection between human rights and environmental rights, and apprehend their interconnectivity. With the aim of moving the narrative forward, she began exploring human migration patterns—and with that, Web3, with concepts like proof of identification. Today, she is still exploring new ways to leverage this new world and find appreciation for it, while pushing the same narrative:
How do we make sure that social and environmental rights are promoted through technology, storytelling, and art?
To her, the Web3 space seemed to provide empathetic ways for human connection, a really wholesome and kind one—and that was enough to draw her in, open up a community for building empathy and curiosity for humans, to serve as a reminder that we are all Actually People.
This project began through a collab with a non-profit, Art Helps, that builds tangible art projects in high-conflict areas as a way to provide second aid for communities who really need space to feel freedom and creativity. Laura wanted to help them fund projects using Web3 and a decentralized fundraising, but as soon as she received the green light, war in Ukraine broke out. Together, Actually People and Art Helps quickly adapted their collaboration model and decided to build a physical space for creating art backed by a digital community of like-minded people.
Laura’s entire career has been focused on measuring impact—but impact is never just good or bad, it’s always both, she says. And for her, using Web3 technology is a very interesting way to get very tangible about the impact of their organization in real life.
“Using NFTs is a way to design positive impact to occur from the get-go, to inherently architect it within the paradigm of what we’re building.”
Laura sees a decentralized funding through the NFTs as a win-win: a chance to create an architecture for this to happen in perpetuity, and build a community project that holds financial value for the community holders as well as fund the non-profit. The non-profit, in this case Art Helps, can thus focus on what they do best: delivering art workshops. Such funding also allows people to contribute to a common “bank” of a physical space that will be based either in Ukraine or Iraq (they’re deciding on it as you read this). Their goal is to build a creative space that will exist within these refugee communities they’re working with. So every time someone purchases an NFT, a little bit more of that building space can exist. As a bonus, buyers have access to Actually People’s shopping list, and can see where the funding from the purchase of that NFT goes to, be it wall paint, light bulbs, or anything else. It builds a lot of trust, but that also means they have to get everything right. “It’s kind of like meeting someone for the first time and showing all your cards — there’s no room for failure,” Laura says.
The first NFT collection was Actually People’s co-creation with the Art Helps and a community of around 50 children from Ukraine, Syria, Egypt who had relocated to Germany. During the workshop they explored a few concepts alongside various artists and created a set of characters that embody a person’s creative spark. “You know that feeling that you get not just when you’re ‘writing a novel’ or painting, but making a sandwich, or getting dressed,” Laura describes, “That feeling that you’re communicating something you’re feeling.”
The result of this collaboration was a set of characters that embody a person’s creative spark, turned into a series of NFTs called The Creative Ones, impersonations of those sparks. Any time someone mints the NFT, they input the answers to a few questions — “kind of like pulling a tarot card” — and their creative one becomes a representation of who they are, and a personification of that spark — “a visionary”, “a destructive creative”, etc.
When doing something impactful, you want to be able to be sure of the positive income — but in the Web3 space one needs to accept the uncertainty, Laura says. Of course the co-existence of the digital project and real-life impact can be intimidating, too. Decentralized funding needs to work “today” to be able to bring people in a bus from Ukraine, or cater to other urgent needs. These are real tangible necessities, and Laura is still learning her way around it.
“We have to embrace experimentation as this acknowledgement that we don’t have all the answers, we’re just in this liminal space where the solutions, the processes and the community are still being built. The rules aren’t there yet, and that feels both scary and liberating. We all need a dose of insanity and bravery to even be thinking about Web3”.
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Katia Zoritch, writer at the House of Beautiful Business
