Lanza

Civic participation improves educational outcomes, increases learning quality, and incites political engagement. It provides a platform for students to contribute to their communities and build local support networks by applying their abilities in the real world. And has proved particularly beneficial for underserved students. Service learning has been found to be a stronger predictor of graduation and retention than gender, racial background, first-generation student status, and GPA. These benefits represent an invaluable resource for humanity that cannot be wasted, yet we are losing them. 

In the last 10 years, civil society participation has fallen in more than 100 countries, and just last year 118 have implemented significant restrictions to civic space.  Advances in democracy made over the last 35 years have been wiped out, with freedom of expression deteriorating in 35 countries and government censorship worsening in 47 countries. These statistics paint a bleak outlook on the more than 40,000 NGOs and hundreds of thousands of community-based organizations worldwide. Parallel to this phenomenon, civic scores for students have seen a worldwide decline.

To learn more about our extensive research into the problem you can visit our website. 

Our solution is a free global index of civil society organizations. This project can aid individuals or educational institutions in finding suitable organizations to collaborate with. We provide a web application (www.projectlanza.org) where CSOs can easily register themselves and be found by potential volunteers or interested parties. 

Using Open AI’s API and Pinecone we optimize search results to match users with organizations that precisely meet their needs and interests. This innovative approach allows our technology to increase positive engagement outcomes. In turn, our solutions also help organizations get into contact with local volunteers who have valuable skills.  

The global index also serves as a resource center, where organizations worldwide can find information on the implementation of accessibility technology, internationally recognized volunteering standards, and assessment tools. 

You can view a demo of our web app and technology here.

We primarily serve civil society organizations and students interested in community engagement. For students, our index is an opportunity to develop real-world skills that they might have otherwise not had the chance to apply. It enables them to improve their communities and creates local support networks that will help them through their education and careers. Participation in civil society also helps increase graduation rates and other educational outcomes, especially for underserved groups. Students worldwide with health conditions or impairments would also see significant growth in their possibilities for engagement if organizations worldwide adopted accessibility technologies promoted by our index. 

Organizations would mainly benefit by being able to get in contact with local volunteers, as they have increased levels of engagement and compromise. Getting into contact with specifically students would also help organizations gain valuable skills that are essential to connecting with new generations and promoting a positive cycle of community reinforcement. Furthermore, organizations could increase their impact and efficiency by adopting internationally recognized volunteering standards, accessibility technology, and assessment tools. 

Currently, our team is composed of 12 national representatives each from a distinct country. Some examples include Zambia, Indonesia, Yemen, and Mexico. Each of us has been uniquely involved with activism, including governmental spaces like the High-Level Political Forum of the United Nations, and civil society organizations worldwide and in our local contexts. 

From a mechatronics engineer and a biology medalist to a doctor in mental psychology everyone has different skills. Our team has varied ages, ethnicities, genders, and world views. At Lanza, we believe that diversity is a fundamental aspect of global initiatives and cooperation. Creating a global index requires a profound understanding of the local context, communication mediums, and culture that permeate civil society organizations in specific regions of the world. Our team has precisely the correct people to respond to those local nuances. 

We believe in a horizontally organized organization. This means that we aspire to eliminate levels of hierarchy and encourage creative, autonomous, and self-motivated action. Ideas and disagreements are discussed openly through a digital community hosted on Discord and national representatives have the full liberty of adapting their approach to contacting organizations in their local contexts. This arrangement also increases the efficiency of the organization and reduces dependency and centralization. 

Although the process is still ongoing, our objective is to translate our whole web app into at least 50 different languages. We are also attempting to gather national representatives for each other country in the world to maximize our impact. Furthermore, our team has also completed the creation of a working prototype of our web app and we have already used our contacts to invite organizations into a pilot program that has not yet launched. The technology we use of AI-enabled semantic searches and matching is also innovative in the sector, and no other similar project in history has implemented it to increase its impact. 

You can read more about our team and visit each profile here.  

Our web app already has full functionality. It works to register organizations and individuals. Features are being tested with national representatives and around 5 local organizations. Our semantic search through Open AI’s API and Pinecone already works to match similar interest profiles. However, certain design aspects of the website are still unfinished and we have some explanatory pages still in development. Our web app was coded and launched through Bubble for prototyping and iteration. In the future, we hope to code the web app from scratch to allow for greater flexibility and scalability.

You can get an idea of our current progress by seeing a demo of our web app and technology here or by visiting our website.

Our organization is Applying to Solve for three main reasons. The first and most important one is the access to partnerships and mentoring. We believe that our index has the capability of impacting thousands of organizations worldwide, but to achieve this goal we need partners that will help us scale, implement our solution around the world, and create or source resources for organizations to increase their accessibility and assessment capabilities. We specifically are looking for partners that will help us technologically improve our solution, to reduce costs and errors. And partners that will guide in creating resources for organizations to implement accessibility technology. 

The second reason we are applying to Solve is that it provides a global platform to contact other growing civil society organizations. Many of the technologies that Solve has funded over the years could be reimplemented in organizations all across the world through our index, and the help of partners, thus multiplying the impact of the program and the benefits for humanity. We believe that with Solve as a launching platform our index could adapt to serve as a mechanism for this technology to reach places all around the world.

The third reason for our application to Solve is funding. Although a hard reality to accept, funding is necessary for the development of technology and its scalability. At Lanza, we currently lack grants or investments from other parties, and being selected as a Solver would kick-start us on our path to changing the world.

Although it may sound surprising, no accurate indexes of civil society organizations exist. Even the one managed by the United Nations is severely outdated. Others charge significant sums for organizations to incorporate into their databases or to access information, making it impossible for most community-based organizations to participate. The reason technology in this field has been so unsuccessfully applied lies in the fact that these organizations adopted an approach that benefited parties one-sidedly. Their projects were simply for information gathering and classification, or to provide an appearance of legitimacy to organizations. For organizations, there was no real benefit of incorporating, and the information gathered is so limited, that it was practically useless for people looking to engage.  Our solution is innovative because it applies technology to achieve a win-win situation.  It benefits organizations, which can contact local volunteers, and individuals, who then, in turn, can encounter opportunities that increase their educational outcomes. No other index or similar projects worldwide have incorporated AI to make engagement and matching more effective. This new technology will increase the efficiency of our key proposition, which is offering value to all stakeholders involved. The platform provided by the index will also provide extra value to underserved students and organizations by providing free licenses of use and enabling the spread and application of new accessibility technologies and assessment tools across organizations worldwide.

The main problem we are solving is the reduction in civic engagement worldwide. By doing so our solution will impact students' educational outcomes and development of real-world skills. Important research confirms that civic engagement in local communities increases political participation and educational outcomes. Furthermore, it has been found that individuals with access to these tools often make effective use of them. For example, teachers with the tools to encourage students to participate in their communities, usually have the motivation to apply them usefully. Our technology exists to facilitate this already existing motivation and process, which is why it will be adopted in an impactful way. The AI-enabled semantic search we use to match individuals and organizations will help increase positive outcomes of engagement, as it will tailor each experience to the needs and interests of the stockholders involved.

We have five distinct impact goals to achieve before January one 2025 and that align with our implementation strategy. 

1. Gathering national representatives. We will gather national representatives from at least 30 countries. This goal will be measured by the number of distinct countries with one or more selected national representatives registered in our web app. 

2. Indexing CSOs around worldwide. We will use our software to index 50,000 organizations. This goal will be measured by the number of distinct organizations registered in our web app with all contact and profile information filled out completely.

3. Collaborating with educational institutions. We will implement our solution with at least 20 distinct educational institutions.  This goal will be measured by the number of signed partnerships with educational institutions for them to promote and implement our program for their students. 

4. Connecting volunteers to development opportunities. We will connect 5,000 individuals to professional development opportunities in civil society organizations. This goal will be measured both by the number of verified volunteers' reviews on their experience with an organization and through a survey asking participating organizations if they have recruited volunteers who learned about them through Lanza. 

5. Empowering CSOs for meaningful and inclusive change. We will help 500 organizations to implement new accessibility technologies and assessment tools. This goal will be measured by the number of responses in the 7-10 range of a survey grading the success of implementation on 10 10-point scale sent after 3 months of the download of resource implementation guides. 

You can learn more about our goals, our implementation strategy, and the SMART framework that powers them here.

Our solution is based on two fundamental technologies. The first is web applications, which allow anybody in the world to access the resources we provide. By implementing software solutions and data gathering systems through the web app, Lanza can significantly reduce the workload of registering organizations, as they can input detailed information without external effort. It also enables the spread of new technologies and tools that organizations can easily find and implement through resource guides hosted on our website. The web application also provides a platform in which interested individuals can effectively search for organizations using a wide array of filters. This search is optimized by our second important technology which is AI-enabled semantic searches. Through the APIs of Open AI embeddings and Pinecones vector database and query we can tailor search results to the specific profiles of each individual and organization. We use their inputs to construct a “digital signature” of thousands of elements and dimensions that matter to each stakeholder. This in turn allows us to create effective matches that improve positive engagement outcomes.

You can view a demo our technology here.

Currently, our team is composed of 12 volunteer national representatives and each of them is committed to working 3-5 hours a week. The web app manages the indexing of organizations, which reduces the workload significantly. 

As a concept, Lanza has existed since July 2023 and was presented to several attendants of the High-Level Political Forum in the United Nations. This process began to construct the relationships and contacts that would later join together for the construction of our current prototype. The project officially began development at the start of February 2024, which means we have consistently worked for 3 months or 0.25 years. 

At Lanza, we commit to Diversity, equity, and inclusion. For our solution, it is imperative to gather individuals with different characteristics, worldviews, and experiences. Our work is based on the ability of these individuals to adapt to their local contexts through their unique understanding and capability, which makes this a central focus of our organization. We also believe in a horizontally organized organization. This means that we aspire to eliminate levels of hierarchy and encourage creative, autonomous, and self-motivated action. The commitment to this structure of governance allows us to operate autonomously, provide equal opportunities for advancement, and decrease centralization. A central part of our ethos is being as inclusive as possible, providing new opportunities to underserved communities. Our solution has the unique potential to help these communities increase their social fabric and educational outcomes. It was designed with the idea of worldwide accessibility and thus drives our commitment to providing free resources and implementing our technology in countries that have traditionally been excluded from global processes or have significant barriers to access. 

Several actions are taken to ensure these principles are followed as closely as possible. All qualified national representatives and team members with an interest in joining Lanza are considered without discrimination based on ethnic origin, sexual orientation, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, disability, age, or any other factor inherent to their identity. We are committed to providing accessibility by offering diverse engagement methods for individuals to contact organizations, ensuring personalization, autonomy,  relevance, and supporting collaboration and persistence through shared successes. To assure our alignment to these principles we have also adopted a policy of transparency. We pledge open communication, sharing progress, challenges, and decisions openly. Our organizational structure, processes, and finances are accessible for scrutiny.

Key Resources:

Our web application serves as the primary resource for accessing the global index of CSOs and related resources.

Our AI-enabled semantic search technology facilitates precise matching between users and organizations.

Our diverse team of national representatives provides expertise in activism, local contexts, and technology development.

Collaborations with educational institutions and other organizations provide access to a wide network of stakeholders.

Funding, whether through grants, investments, or partnerships, sustains our operations and expansion efforts.

Key Activities:

Continuously improving the user experience and functionality of our web application.

Identifying and indexing CSOs worldwide, ensuring accurate and up-to-date profiles.

Refining our AI algorithms to enhance search accuracy and effectiveness.

Establishing collaborations with educational institutions, NGOs, and other stakeholders to expand our reach.

Engaging with users, CSOs, and partners to gather feedback and improve our services.

Marketing and promoting our platform to increase awareness and attract users and organizations.

Key Stakeholders:

Organizations registered in our platform that, seek volunteers, resources, and collaboration opportunities.Individuals/Volunteers: Individuals looking for engagement

Individuals/Volunteers looking for opportunities to develop skills, contribute to communities and enhance their educational outcomes.

Schools, colleges, and universities to facilitate student engagement and promote our platform.

Funders and Investors: Entities providing financial support to sustain and scale our operations.

Government and Policy Makers: Stakeholders interested in promoting civic engagement and social development.

Channels:

Website: Our primary channel for users to access the web application and resources is www.projectlanza.org. 

Social Media: Utilizing platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin for promotion, engagement, and outreach. 

Partnerships: Collaborating with educational institutions, NGOs, and other organizations to reach their networks.

Events and Conferences: Participating in relevant events and conferences like the High-Level Political Forum to showcase our platform and engage with stakeholders.

Word of Mouth: Leveraging satisfied users and partners to spread the word about our platform.

Value Proposition:

For Students: Access to meaningful engagement opportunities, skill development, and networking to enhance educational outcomes and personal growth.

For Civil Society Organizations: Access to a global pool of volunteers, resources, and best practices to increase impact and efficiency.

For Educational Institutions: A platform to promote civic engagement, community involvement, and experiential learning opportunities for students.

For Funders and Investors: The opportunity to support a scalable solution addressing declining civic engagement and promoting social and educational development.

For Government and Policy Makers: A tool to promote civic participation, social cohesion, and educational outcomes within communities.

Cost Structure: Our main expenses are maintaining our web app, and utilizing the APIs from Pinecone and Open AI. All other work is currently managed by volunteers. 

Surplus: In the case of surplus all profit will be reinvested into the maintenance and improvement of the project.

Revenue: We currently have two strategies for revenue production:

Charge the use of our AI optimizer over a certain number of uses, and offer packages to educational institutions.  

In the case of implementing a feature to give donations to organizations through Lanza, charge a very small commission to ensure maintenance of the site. 

Our plan to become financially sustainable centers our policy on revenue production and expenses. However, our organization still has not implemented revenue strategies and thus we cannot provide concrete evidence of its results. However, you can check out a detailed breakdown of our expenses, revenue, and user forecasting here.

Expenses:

Our web app: The web app costs around 30 dollars a month to maintain with the website costing around 10 dollars a month. and when scaled to larger audiences this year we forecast the costs will increase to around 100-200 dollars. Improving our technology will be much more expensive, which is one of the reasons we are applying to Solve. 

Our APIs: These APIs are changed by usage and every user and query adds a very small margin to total costs. Their costs can be exponentially covered by the following solutions. 

AI Optimizer Usage:

By charging for the use of our AI optimizer over a certain number of searches, we can generate additional revenue for the organization while still maintaining full functionality for the average user. This revenue can be used to cover operational expenses, invest in further technology development, and scale our platform. Implementing this model will also incentivize users to optimize their searches and make more effective use of the platform. As the platform grows and more users engage with our AI-enabled semantic search, charging for usage can help ensure the sustainability of our operations. Offering different tiers of usage plans will allow us to cater to the needs of various users and ensure that our pricing model remains accessible while also supporting the organization's financial sustainability.

Packages:

By offering tailored packages to educational institutions, we can establish strategic partnerships that promote our platform to a wider audience of students and educators. These partnerships can include features such as customized branding, dedicated support, and increased usage of the AI optimizer. This tactic would diversify our revenue streams beyond individual users and CSOs and thus support the organization's long-term sustainability and growth, reducing reliance on grants or donations. Along with access to the platform, packages can include additional services such as training workshops, educational resources, and reporting tools. 

Donations with Commission:

Charging a small commission on donations made through our platform would ensure a sustainable revenue stream for maintaining and improving the site. This revenue can cover operational costs, development expenses, and ongoing maintenance, ensuring the longevity of our services. By taking a commission on donations, we align our incentives with the success of the organizations using our platform. As organizations receive more donations through our site, our revenue also increases, creating a mutually beneficial relationship. We are also committed to being transparent about the commission charged on donations to foster trust and transparency with our users. 

Assurances to maintain access to underserved communities and individuals. 

In our commitment to accessibility, we will provide licenses of use to both underserved individuals and educational institutions that allow them to take advantage of the full functionality of the application.