People Tree Nonprofit from Universal Schedule LLC

What if solving climate change was as simple as a price?  A price—as in the prices we pay for goods and services. We have a new financial incentive system called SmartPrices™️ that works to stimulate demand. It does so with a new routing infrastructure to smartly deploy incentives that accelerate adoption of technology—in this case, to curb emissions. Research results from our teams in lean startup programs, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and others, suggest that inertia in the marketplace is a major hindrance to achieving emission goals. Yet, consumers are seeking more ways to act affirmatively for climate. 

Accelerating the development of new products and services in the consumer sector that curb emissions can be accomplished with our technology. Pricing can stimulate the demand; it's a law of economics. We offset costs through credits and generated revenue. We lack, until now, a way to optimize demand for beneficial outcomes. We will use the Elevate Prize (EP) funding to grow our presence with strategic partners and to build a basic first system that enables us to begin accelerating this now. The EP network will be vital to opening doors with organizations who will use SmartPrices for incentivizing good action.

To be honest and up-front, the origin story for this began at Ground Zero on 9/11/2001. I'm a Federally Registered Survivor. I ran to the site and got there just as the second tower fell. I was there all day taking photographs, documenting the site. And then, later that week, I was in India at the Gandhi Ashram on a planned trip. I've been on an odyssey since, spanning academia and industry, seeking to find a way to end conflict—so our world is not defined by calamitous events. 

I conceived the idea for SmartPrices in New York City, while in a ministry program at Union Theological Seminary. The goal of our nonprofit “PeopleTree” is to ad-minister to the needs of people, and amplify that through new technology—new technology that helps accomplish the dreams of social justice and overcoming socioeconomic inequality. I thought that we could do it with new technology, in a way that will build equity through markets and empower consumers to directly affect positive change. In doing so, we can advance "capitalism" into something that's sustainable and generative. This economic development application for climate change uses a vetted technology to direct funds when and where they're needed most. 

What!

We're using new technology and pricing to curb carbon emissions. Consumer markets are an untapped lever to accelerate the reduction of emissions. The problem at its root is classic: the rate of adoption for new consumer technology is too slow.

Solar technology is finally reaching maturation. Now, there are new consumer technologies that can contribute to curbing emissions, from plant-based foods and apparel manufacturing techniques to new efficiencies in air-conditioning and sequestering CO2 in concrete, just for example. The new timeline we need to curb emissions and the classic timeline are unaligned. We must align them. 

Climate change affects 328+ million Americans and all global populations. 

How?

The technology provides a new fintech routing system for nonprofits to accelerate technology maturation. The system is also designed to enable the production of new value with consumer data to further accelerate the maturing of greening technologies. The nonprofit use of the technology is aimed at the financial system to route incentives, price credits, and rewards to consumers for purchases. Incentives matter. In the US, 72% of consumers said that incentives were the most effective way to persuade them to purchase [Statista]. We empower this purpose for nonprofits/philanthropic organizations to maximize impact.

SmartPrices can encourage better consumer choices while also affecting positive social, cultural, and global change. Our Distributed Ledger (DL) technology enables a shift towards customer-centric data that helps bring data revenues into local communities. This may alter how people think of their data—as a revenue stream, i.e., to pay for their food. Our work goes deeply into the structure of how eCommerce operates on the Internet, to unlock the potential for consumer data and harness it towards beneficial collective outcomes.

Digital addresses are foundational for the internet, i.e., Internet Protocol (IP) addresses and Automated ClearingHouse (ACH) routing numbers. SmartPrices uses new electronic addresses to decouple customer data from social media into a decentralized smart incentive system that complies with data-privacy regulations. This allows us to curate new analytical data that helps nonprofits do their work better. It makes it easier to reach their recipients. SmartPrices builds incentives on-demand into the price displayed to a customer for products and services. It’s a democratized pay-it-forward system. 

The nonprofit thrust of this work can tap into the wealth generated in cryptocurrency markets. Our DL technology diverts capital created in cryptocurrency towards collective uses that amplify consumer choices and accelerate responsiveness to climate change.

We've had to situate our nonprofit work first with business development. It's vital for us because one of the pillars of this work centers around creating more value with consumer. We offer a transformational pivot, not doing simply doing more of the same nonprofit or tech business. 

We don't want to hope for climate change miracles; we are proactively and creatively attacking the problem from a mutually beneficial consumer angle.

We have a deeply transformative approach that can change the way the internet works in order to enable faster, more pivotal change. We wanted to unlock the creativity and entrepreneurial spirit of others in the process. The architecture of our system will empower others with a requisite financial backbone necessary to fuel their own creative solutions with social-impact purposes.

We fought for the chance to change how things work, to transform it for the social good, without having to cater to the single-bottom-line VCs and shareholders who care only for return-on-investment (ROI). We want a nonprofit/business model that preserves a double/triple bottom line. Our approach can impact food security, socioeconomic development, and healthcare. 

The Founder has patents pending on this technology from 2016 to protect development for the common good.