Announcing our first $1M Grant Pool for Innovative Climate Projects

Here’s how to apply.

Published in

Future Quest

8 min readNov 17, 2022

UPDATE: Due to popular demand, deadline extended to Dec 7th!

We partnered up with friends at BMW Foundation, Polygon, Celo, Gitcoin, ReFiDAO, Boba Network and more to launch a $1M grant pool for innovative climate projects.

Quick Facts

Deadline for submissions: ̶N̶o̶v̶e̶m̶b̶e̶r̶ ̶3̶0̶t̶h̶ December 7th
(please follow our Twitter for updates).
Minimum grant value: $25k
Application is one quick form with instructions included
To apply you need to hold a Future Quest NFT (more below)

Apply here 👉 https://future.quest/submit

Now, let’s learn about our why and how:

Future Quest

This summer we started building Future Quest, an ecosystem that makes it easy, enjoyable, and rewarding for people to take action on climate change.

We have identified outsized potential in connecting human and financial resources with high-impact projects tackling climate change. Nonprofits, startups, and moonshots — collectively referred to as Quests.

Future Quest emerged from Future Horizon, an event series started in 2020 that has grown into a global community that envisions, builds, and celebrates a regenerative future. We curated this collective of entrepreneurs, innovators, artists, indigenous leaders, and impact-oriented billionaires to make the action for good electrifying, transcendental, and, simply: fun.

Some outtakes from just the latest gatherings at WebSummit and COP27.

It worked. Organizations born within the community have collectively raised $250M+ in nonprofit funds in this short time to make a real difference in climate, COVID-19 relief, social justice and education. Today, our small but impactful gatherings happen around the world, as well as alongside major conferences such as Climate Week, Web Summit and COP27 just recently.

With Future Quest we see a once in a lifetime opportunity at the intersection of several converging long term trends: web3, ballooning private climate investing, exponential demand for carbon credits, public adoption of man-made climate change science and the global transformation of economy and work-place.

We believe the future is millions of people working to solve the climate crisis to earn money and gain rewards in a new form of a distributed economy.

Some call it the Future of Work. We like to think of it as the first massively multiplayer online game for climate. We’re making it fun and rewarding. An exciting adventure towards a new regenerative future.

Our goal is to accelerate the removal/reduction of 1Gt of carbon (CO2e) from the atmosphere.

Climate Opportunity

Maintaining the current course is a difficult choice for humanity. With projected 1.2 billion refugees, 33% of all species extinct, ravaging heat waves, hurricanes and war, our nearterm future is not a welcoming place. We stand at the doorstep of this reality, and we are not advancing fast enough in solving the problem.

This can change faster than we think. And it is possible.

The threat is driving exponential growth in investment, with a lot of room to scale. Estimates by the UN, McKinsey and many others indicate that climate is a multi-trillion dollar opportunity in tackling the interlinked climate, biodiversity, and land degradation crises.

This means that there is a huge gap that needs to be filled in order to make the necessary progress on climate change. And this gap is being filled at an exponential rate. Each year a record number of investors and companies are embracing net-zero ambitions.

Climate is becoming a multi-trillion dollar opportunity.

Enter: ReFi

Simultaneously, a new ecosystem of web3 climate tech organizations is rising — known collectively as “ReFi” or Regeneration Finance. ReFi represents an economic evolution in both mindset and technology that can enable the rapid scaling of much-needed climate action.

“The Polygon ecosystem has seen promising growth of new ideas seeking to tackle our current environmental and social challenges. This grant pool will support ideas at a critical stage in their development, ensuring economic conditions do not slow efforts to deliver solutions that can help us transition to an equitable and sustainable existence for humanity, the earth and its natural diversity.”
— Stefan Renton, Sustainability Lead at Polygon

ReFi was very recently recognized by Forbes as one of top 5 web3 trends in 2023.

“ReFi is just one year old and we estimate over 500 ReFi startups have already been created, offering a chance to tackle climate change in a myriad of innovative ways that could help redefine our extractive economy and mobilize a more sustainable future.”
— Matt Cyrankiewicz, founder at Future Quest

Threat: Winter Is Here

The current macroeconomic situation threatens many young, highly innovative, promising projects. We are now facing a global financial recession, chaos in financial markets, and a “crypto winter,” which altogether means it is harder than ever to raise for web3 tech solutions to climate change.

Many organizations in the ecosystem depend on Gitcoin grants to continue their research and development. The quadratic funding platform distributes around $4M in grants every quarter and has distributed over $64M in grants to date.

However their next quarterly round (GR16 in Q4) will be pushed to January next year and will happen on a limited scale due to their upcoming system upgrades.

Helping Through The Winter

If these projects fail, we could be missing out on an entire wave of innovation needed to accelerate the progress toward a regenerative future.

We believe that helping these projects weather the winter will have an exponential impact on the fight against climate change in the coming years.

Announcing: $1M Future Quest Grant Pool!

Now that you’re well acquainted with our why and the supporting data, let’s get to the essence of it.

We indicated a need to support innovative and world-changing projects in the ecosystem during the bear market and while Gitcoin’s GR16 is being pushed and is limited in scope.

Future Quest and partners are putting together a $1M grant pool to support innovative founders.

We partnered with Polygon, ReFiDAO, Celo Foundation, BMW Foundation, Boba Network, and Serotonin (More partners TBA.)

Driven by urgency, we decided to “give-first” and raise funds for the ecosystem before we raise for Future Quest.

How To Apply

Do you have a groundbreaking idea that we should hear about? Excellent, we can’t wait to learn about your project. See the details below.

What is the schedule?

Deadline for submissions: November 30th

The process is split into 4 phases:

November: Proposal submissions, council formation, system setup
December: Proposal analysis and refinement, council votes
December-January: Grant funds distribution
January — March: Bounties activation and acceleration

What should I include?

Please make sure that your application assures:

That we understand your needs. Make sure to outline resources you need, from financial to human to smaller tasks (AKA gigs).
That you have a clearly selected and committed leader and team with time availability to advance the Quest.
That we understand how the resources will be used.
That you embed yourself in our online — and ideally IRL! — community to reach support from hundreds of other Regen Heroes.

Is my project eligible?

We are excited to hear about all ideas! However we organize applications in 4 categories in accordance with our combined theory of change. Note that these are listed in order of focus:

Place-based regenerative economies
Climate communications and education
Infrastructure innovation
Other

As part of our theory of change we especially aim to support projects in the global south and founders from underrepresented communities who will be especially impacted by the climate crisis and essential to solving it.

What is the process?

1. Applicants fill out a Quest proposal form.

2. Round 1: Selected Climate Council pre-selects ones to get on a call with our team to refine their concept. They receive early support from Future Quest and other organizations in the ReFi Acceleration Ecosystem.

3. Round 2: Organizations present refined concepts (where needed). Funds are awarded based on their needs and points they received

4. We announce the first Quests to be backed already in December, and then more in January.

How are funds distributed?

There will be only two tiers of grant value ($25k, $50k), awarded based on the amount of points received by a project. The primary selection will be conveyed by a selected council of experts. We are considering opening 2nd round to also include open community votes, mainly subject to development bandwidth, this will be confirmed by mid November.

Winning applicants will receive a single transfer to an EVM compatible wallet of 90% of the granted amount (min. $22,500). Remaining 10% will become a pool for “bounties” to activate the Future Quest community to support the applicant’s project in Q1 2023.

Why do I need an NFT?
We’re building a web3 climate tech acceleration platform, which requires token gating. Holding a Future Quest NFT does not only enable you to apply for the grant but also grants access to areas of our Discord and soon to our app, platform, quests and events. Simply verify your wallet and you will receive increasing access as we build out the ecosystem.

Our Dragon of Regen NFTs were free to mint and are very inexpensive and accessible. If you ask on our Discord you can probably score one for free as well — just submit a ticket!

Apply here!

👉 https://future.quest/submit

WAGFI! 💚

Sources:

Announcing our first $1M Grant Pool for Innovative Climate Projects

Here’s how to apply.

Future Quest

Climate Opportunity

Enter: ReFi

Threat: Winter Is Here

Helping Through The Winter

Announcing: $1M Future Quest Grant Pool!

How To Apply

Written by Matt Leta