Case study
Kolektivo Grants Program
Impact and equity metrics for a regenerative island economy, and a grants programme that put money behind them.
The problem
Curaçao earns, and then leaks. Tourism and remittances pass through and leave. The work that keeps an island alive, the food forests, the neighbourhood projects, the people who rebuild after every storm, is treated as charity rather than infrastructure.
I wanted economic infrastructure that keeps value circling locally, and rewards the work that keeps an island alive.
What I did
- Designed the impact and equity metrics for a regenerative local economy, so that value could be counted beyond GDP.
- Ran the grants programme as Head of Impact, Equity & Inclusion, funding grassroots work across the island.
- Carried ReFi and Blockchain for Good into meetings with policymakers and ministers, and made the case plainly.
- Represented Kolektivo at COP26 and COP27, and at the World Bank.
- Curated, organised and moderated the social impact track of the first Kolektivo Festival.
What changed
More than 40 grants went out. Over $500,000 in social value was added. Five food forests were planted and 35 more mapped. The first Kolektivo Festival brought 700+ people together around a local economy that could actually hold value.
The quieter result was methodological. The programme showed that a small island economy can define, measure and defend value that never appears on a balance sheet.
What it taught me
Measurement is power. If you cannot count something, you cannot defend it when the budget meeting starts.
But if you only count what is easy to count, you end up defending the wrong things. The metric has to follow the work, not the other way around.
Working on something like this?
I take on a small number of advisory engagements at a time, so I can do them properly.