Support Elephant Charities

General Ideas
#1

Summary:

Stake DAO should support charities which help elephants.

Abstract:

Stake DAO would develop one or more methods to generate funds to donate to selected elephant charities.

Some possible methods are:

  1. Have a ‘Help Support Elephants’ button at the bottom of the dashboard. When clicked, it pops up a message about the scheme and an ETH address. People can send ERC20 tokens or ETH to this address. When it reaches a certain value, 90% is donated to charity, 10% is rewarded back to one address which contributed.
  2. Automatically collect a small amount of the fees generated by users of Stake DAO services. This gets collected into an ETH address and donated once a month.
  3. Build a lottery type system where people buy tickets hoping to win prizes like NFT artwork. Some of the proceeds from ticket sales are used to buy the prizes, and the remainder gets donated.

Decisions on which methods to use and which elephant charities to support would be decided by voting.

Motivation:

The Stake DAO logo is an elephant, and elephants are widely used across the theme of the project to represent members of the herd or a herd like support system. All the awesome Telegram stickers are elephant themed.

Elephants are majestic beautiful creatures which we all love, but are sadly endangered and sometimes treated poorly.

Maybe Stake DAO should support them?

For:

  • Help elephants
  • Generate publicity and interest in the project
  • Maybe start a trend which other DAOs or DEXs would follow

Against:

  • Charities would probably not accept crypto directly so it would need to be changed to fiat
10 Likes
#4

Nice formality! I would definitely vote to support organizations that improve not only the lived of wild elephants, but elephants in captivity, working elephants, sanctuaries. I would especially want to solicit advice and input from the most knowledgable elephant welfare advocates and use whatever financial leverage the DAO could provide as an amplification of the best existing work.

4 Likes
#5

I love this proposal and would in principle immediately vote Yes. Elephants are indeed some of the smartest animals in the world, absolutely caring for each other and have been suffering for centuries from human societies and activities.

Some small clarifications I believe are required though, despite this being an idea in an initial stage and even if no one knows the answers yet is food for thought:

  1. Who’s going to perform the payment ? Is it going to be a smart contract, or is it supposed to be manually triggered or based on some time/date/block constraint ?

  2. Are we going to be supporting one charity in specific or several of them ?

  3. How are we going to proceed into delivering the money into them ? Will we contact them and ask them to create a wallet, or is someone going to cash out and make a donation to their bank account ?

2 Likes
#6

I’ve slept on this and I believe it should be important to include the intention that should StakeDAO achieve some level of donations within a year that the scope and variety of the contributions be necessarily reevaluated.

I believe it’s important to build the value of judgement and decrement in the face of changing conditions into our earliest proposals.

1 Like
#7

These are all questions we need to work out going forward but my initial thoughts would be:

  1. Keep it as simple as possible at first. An admin member could set up a wallet dedicated to elephant charity donations. Then we get the address added to the bottom of the dashboard page with a short explanation.

  2. I’d say select a single charity via voting and see how things go. We can vote to change it or add others in the future.

  3. In the near term, I’d say we would need to convert the donated crypto to fiat, then send that to the charity by PayPal. The admin member would do this.

This evening I have sent emails to three elephant charities asking if they accept crypto donations. If I get any replies I’ll post them here. This should at least give us an idea on the likelihood of them accepting crypto directly.

Reading a bit more into what the charities are doing and what happens to elephants, it all makes me feel even stronger that this is a worthwhile thing to attempt.

1 Like
#8

This proposal is great, look forward to follow-up.

2 Likes
#9

I got a reply…

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2 Likes
#10

:pensive: Shows how early we are…

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2 Likes
#11

We need then a plan in order to liquidate and transfer the fees/donations (Paypal or bank account). This adds a layer of complexity to this, which is the human factor and the fact that the community won’t be able to directly verify that the transfer was indeed accomplished, aside from the potential screenshots – which can eventually be gamed.

Open to my mind being changed on this obviously, this is a neat idea.

2 Likes
#12

Well, that’s a nice proposal that I would absolutely vote positive. However, I am on the side of getting the platform working as expected first and definitely come back to this proposal once done. The fact that charities do not accept cryptos per say is maybe because they fo not know about stablecoins. We could consider this approach and present it this way instead of speaking of cryptos in general.

4 Likes
#13

While I’m definitely up for using DAO profits for charity, I think implementing this at such an early stage would be a very unusual move that could make Stake DAO be labelled just as “the elephant charity one” amongst other more serious protocols.

This, as well as other charities, could be an excellent feature once we are more established, but lets focus on benefitting our users first?

3 Likes
#14

I agree with you and thanks for taking the time to reply. I didn’t mean to suggest this proposal should be a high priority or done in the short term.
As you say, priority should be on benefiting the users, then maybe things like this could come later.

1 Like
#15

It would be cool if there were an ElephantDAO that would collect funds from a variety of sources, not just StakeDAO, and distribute funds to a set of Elephant related projects around the world. ElephantDAO could be a model for non-profit decentralized governance.

I agree with an0nynoir that it’s not critical path at this point for StakeDAO but it’s still a good idea and a cool project.

And as a model for how this might roll out, given the silly response from Holly Roberts, you gotta watch this awesome and funny TED talk about the formation of the men’s health prostate cancer research funding project that brought mustache growing in November (ie ‘Movember’) to Australia and the world. Healthier men, one moustache at a time: Adam Garone at TEDxToronto - YouTube