Looking beyond our own garden 🌱🍅 (Q3 2023)

Published in

Goparity

6 min readOct 27, 2023

Dear community,

It’s 7 a.m. on a Thursday, it’s a National holiday in Spain today, and I’m writing from my living room. As usual, I have not succeeded in being silent and there’s three children reading on the sofa next to me. 😅

Outside the window, I see our eternally unfinished small garden. I put a lot of effort to it, but it never seems to be enough. Still, as usual, hard work pays off: plants are growing happier, the vegetable garden is more productive and the ground is greener (because of water scarcity, I’m trying to grow whatever occurs spontaneously and keep it under control).

The garden may be slowly looking prettier, but the world has become an uglier place since I last wrote: an old conflict has taken dramatic proportions, things are not better in Ukraine and extreme events are taking place all over the world, with catastrophic consequences, from earthquakes, to severe drought, flooding and wildfires.

Adding to this, and after a record-breaking June, we also had the hottest July and September ever recorded on Earth.

At Goparity we also had a quarter of ups and downs. I’d like to tell you otherwise but, as always, we prefer to tell you the whole story.

Last quarter’s highlights 🚀

🚀 July was our best month ever with 1,25M€ invested through the platform.

📈 We launched our statistics page, where you can find the main statistics about our performance and also the performance of our loans;

🇲🇽 Our first project in Mexico was a success and also a record-breaking one with 500k€ raised in one single campaign in only 11 days;

💪 After launching in Canada in June, we successfully funded our first project via Goparity Canada, one dedicated to providing reliable and affordable renewable energy to indigenous communities;

👩‍💻 Again, we heard our community and delivered what was asked: our women-led #GoparityMeetUp achieved a new record with over 230 registrations and around 80 simultaneous attendees. You can look forward to a new one, in English, sometime soon (learn more about our MeetUps here). Oh, it was open to all genders, of course;

📊 We launched a Beta version of our financial area in the platform, already available for some of our beta-testers.

[To learn more about how to become a Goparity beta-tester, head to the email on your inbox.]

Our ongoing loans, including in arrears 📊

We take your money and all our loans very seriously so I want to report on that — I promise to do it every quarter.

As you know, things don’t always go according to plan. Despite our rigorous risk analysis and risk mitigation procedures, starting last year, we’ve had some projects enter in arrears.

Since then, debt recovery has taken a big part of our time. As you might understand, negotiations, restructurings and judicial processes have their own rhythm.

When a project enters a litigation process, we no longer dictate the timings and thus might not be updating information for a while — that’s because nothing new happened.

This past quarter we focused on developing new internal procedures and preventive measures, but we also increased resources dedicated to it, including the hiring of a new part-time team member.

I’m happy to share that the first positive results are starting to show with 13 loans in arrears regularized and 3 loan restructurings successfully concluded within the past 3 months. 💪

Improving information on our ongoing loans 🔎

Increasing the number and quality of updates about the projects we finance is one of our main goals and concerns. You might have noticed an improvement on the updates about our projects in arrears — on each project’s page — but that is just the beginning.

Iara, our Impact Officer, is working on creating updates that will go well beyond loans in arrears to report on the impact achieved, the status of implementation and relevant news about these projects.

Bringing new projects to our platform — we need you 👋

Despite a great July, August and September observed much less investment — just over 1,3M€ between the two — due to a temporary scarcity of projects in the platform.

If there was any doubt about the reason for this, October already clarified it with +600k€ invested in the first half of the month.

In my last email we spoke about the network effect and how our collective reach is growing bigger. I’m sure that, among us, we have access to amazing projects by trustworthy companies or entrepreneurs that could use Goparity financing to take their projects to the next level.

A reward of 150€ for each project you refer 🤝
For each project you refer that passes our risk criteria, is placed on our platform and is successfully funded, we will reward you with 150€ in Goparity investments.
Remember we only fund projects implemented by established organizations, which are solvent and the use of money is directly related to at least one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).
If you have any project in mind, just reply to this email, or email Matias at matiasha@goparity.com and we’ll revert with the specific details.

What to expect during the next quarter? 🔜

I can’t end my message without unveiling some of what’s coming, as usual:

🎁 The return of our Christmas Gift Vouchers (which will also, for the first time, be available for use in Goparity Canada). Buy yours here!

📊 The public launch of our new financial area in the platform (remember you can get early access by becoming a beta-tester)

🚀 We’ll be opening new projects for funding in Europe and Canada

🇪🇺 Full adoption of the new EU Crowdfunding regulation. You can expect an email about this in the coming months. There some small additional administrative burden but also several improvements (Spoiler: there’s no longer a limit of 3000€ per investment nor a limit of 10.000€ invested in 12 months.)

Choose our next features 🔮

If you want to have your say on the features you’d like us to launch next, head to this email in your inbox to rank the options in order of preference.

A guarantee fund that will partially cover your risk;
A green debt account with a payment card;
A partnerships program with exclusive deals;
Accounts for children;
Equity crowdfunding;
New investment types (eg. ETFs).

Creating a real community 👫

Finally, I’m also sharing the results to the question I sent on my last email, about strengthening our ties as a community: given we all share the common belief of using our money for good, should we find a way to recognize (and eventually meet) each other more?