An Attempt at Democratizing Resource Allocation for Social Movements Using Decentralized Autonomous Organizations

Abstract

Often, a distributed and loosely coordinated set of grassroots organizations spawn to deal with local issues such as, but not limited to, classism, sexism, and racism that drive social movements like Occupy Wallstreet, Me Too, and Black Lives Matter. When no pre-existing umbrella organization can tie them, it is difficult to coordinate and allocate resources. At the same time, through the Internet, a local issue can spread to become a national or global movement, requiring the speed of coordination to match the speed of the sentiment surrounding the issue.

I propose the creation of a network to garner and manage donations with widespread support for these grassroots, decentralized social movements by facilitating the democratization of resources towards the small and local organizations that are enabling action on behalf of the movement. I hypothesize that a decentralized structure, particularly a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), can act as this network and ensure that each organization can scale at its own rate and that the donors who participate in the DAO can better and more effectively coordinate their support. My goal is for small and local organizations with a common goal to come together to create a DAO that absorbs the support of people who pool funds through the DAO and decide where those funds go. This decision-making is executed via a smart contract-based voting mechanism. In essence, I argue that through DAOs, social movements can both more effectively raise funds and allocate them.