Can Money Serve Life? How to Fund Communities Doing the Real Work with Matthew Monahan
About this episode
Nate Hagens and Matthew Monahan discuss the challenges and opportunities in funding grassroots environmental and community projects through regenerative finance.
Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars flow through global philanthropy, yet only a small fraction reaches environmental, climate, and nature-related causes. Meanwhile, in small towns and rural communities around the world, a hidden throughline of regenerative work is already underway. This work rarely waits for large-scale funding to begin, but it does need resourcing to grow into replicable movements capable of propelling system-wide change. What would it take to build financial infrastructure that actually gets capital to the people already doing the work of healing land and community? In this episode, Nate is joined by Matthew Monahan, co-founder of the nonprofit Ma Earth, to explore the emerging field of regenerative finance. Matthew digs into why top-down, siloed, and low-trust funding systems keep capital from reaching frontline communities, and how tools like open protocols, decentralized data commons, and blockchains might (with healthy consideration) help coordinate trust and resourcing at scale. Matthew also discusses Ma Earth's collective crowdfunding platform that pairs philanthropic dollars with community fundraising for grassroots land and ecological projects…
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