Nowadays, it seems that imagining a better future, a brighter future, is a delusion. This world lacks hope; we have been led to believe that a dystopian future inevitably awaits us.
At Platoniq Foundation, at Goteo, we are convinced that another future is possible. And we do not believe this as an act of faith. We know it is possible because we have been promoting and accompanying initiatives that have made what seemed utopian a reality for 20 years.
Until it became a reality, it was a utopia that citizens could sue the banks and succeed in bringing to jail those who, with corrupt practices, put the country on the brink of economic rescue. But #15MPaRato promoted the Bankia case, obtained the return of almost 10,000 million to affected people and obtained responsibilities for the #TarjetasBlack
It also seemed utopian that a cooperative newspaper would manage to maintain its independence and economic solvency through crowdfunding. And here we have La Marea, whose four Goteo campaigns have already raised more than €535,500.
Not to mention campaigns like Kids for the future, an educational project to raise awareness among future generations about the environmental impact of human beings on the planet. Or Las Kellys, the waitresses' union that raised the money to set up its own booking centre, free of exploitation and with guarantees of fair work. Or Top Manta, the first fashion line launched by the Popular Union of Street Vendors of Barcelona that has culminated in a social enterprise project.
At Goteo we have a catalogue of truly transformative alternatives that have had a huge impact on society. These and many, many more have been achievements that once seemed impossible. But Utopia is only utopia until someone makes it real. And we are immensely proud and grateful to have been part of it.
Now we want to go much further. There are many more utopias to achieve. For example:
- To continue developing a calculator that allows measuring the social impact of crowdfunding campaigns and to have it adopted by our driving community.
- To have a school of deliberation and critical thinking to empower the younger generation.
- To create a time lab
- Contribute to the Social and Solidarity Economy becoming the hegemonic model and not the alternative
- ...
There are many ideas that we want to germinate. The soil is already fertile and we have the drip irrigation system (GOTEO) to nourish them. Now we need something else to make the seeds sprout: we need more water. That is why, for the first time, we are launching a crowdfunding campaign to collect donations for our foundation. We need the kind of rain that fills the reservoirs, flows down the rivers and waters everything.
Do you also believe that another world is possible? Do you want to sow utopian futures with us? Donate to the foundation, amplify the wave and go with our flow!
Main features and goals of the crowdfunding campaign
At Platoniq Foundation, through the Goteo.org platform and the experience of its team, we provide knowledge and tools so that transformative projects and the people behind them can improve, grow and achieve their goals.
With Goteo we don't just offer funding, we have a team of people who accompany the projects and advise them step by step. **We are facilitators of alliances and we create a community around each campaign.
Every year we promote new partnerships with public and private institutions to generate new forms of co-financing, or democratic financing, innovating in the third sector and in the way public funds are allocated and distributed publicly. The body of experience and knowledge accumulated over the years is transmitted and shared through numerous national and international workshops, conferences and public events.
As you know, Goteo is an open source platform, and we also publish all the information generated around the platform's activity on the Goteo statistics page, promoting transparency and accountability.
As Platoniq, we have a long history of experience in designing participatory processes and citizen dialogues, developing open source digital tools, and training and consulting in the digital transition and collaborative economy.
In 2022, after the merger of the two organisations and now as Platoniq Foundation, we have designed the strategic plan with which we want to address the major challenges we face as a society, in a context where despair, the vision of dystopian futures and the concentration of power in the hands of a few reigns.
We have united the best of both worlds, to make us stronger and become that social impact wave that generates a chain of empowerment for citizens, communities and projects. We want to collectively build the future we want. A beautiful, hopeful, fair future for all people and sustainable for ecosystems.
Why this is important
We have been demonstrating for years that another world is possible. In this platform, you can find a catalogue of initiatives that show that there is hope. That there are viable alternatives to the dystopian present and the future imposed upon us.
We want to continue to nurture this hope, to continue to nourish transformative projects with funding, community and alliances. We want to continue activating citizen mobilisation and recover the power to decide.
At the Foundation we face the daily challenge of collectively organising work oriented towards democratic innovation in a way that is coherent with our values and organisational principles and in the Third Sector.
Our funding model, a hybrid between public and private funding, allows us to be financially sustainable and we are fortunate to be able to carry out activities that are 100% aligned with our values and have a collective return. However, the demands of day-to-day operations make it difficult to have quality time to innovate, go deeper, analyse, measure impact, take retrospectives, and even take a rest.
For this internal and external transformation we need resources and, above all, we need the most precious and scarce resource in our society: time. Making a donation is a way of giving us more time to innovate, to weave more networks and alliances, to take care of ourselves and to take care of our community. We would like to expand our team by adding two more people to the Goteo advisory team, as well as a researcher in data analysis and data journalism.
This project is aimed at all of you who, like us, want to build a better world. At all the people who know that our foundation serves as a driving force for all these initiatives that offer us a more desirable future. To those of you who trust that we generate knowledge that is worth investing in.
In 2022 we have already received more than €15,000 thanks to more than 6,000 donors who have placed their trust in our foundation. We thank you very much! With this, we have already reached the minimum we need to continue implementing improvements to the Goteo platform and to keep evolving and maintaining its open source code. **Now, let's go for the optimum!
Team and experience
Have you ever wondered who created Goteo? Did you know that the platform is managed by a Foundation? What is the reason and what does this imply?
Goteo is a project created by Platoniq, an association born in 2001 and led by Susana Noguero and Olivier Schulbaum with the aim of promoting free culture and opentechnology.
After years of promoting projects, tools and methodologies that were pioneers and received several international recognitions, Platoniq asks itself this question: how to make initiatives viable and sustainable with social impact?
And in response to this challenge, Goteo was born in 2011. Platoniq decided to manage the platform from a foundation, as a non-profit entity that ensures the maintenance of the principles of openness, neutrality, transparency and independence in the development and maintenance of the crowdfunding platform. In this way, what would be called the Goteo Foundation until 2021, focused on the field of ethical and democratic funding, was created.
Meanwhile, Platoniq continued in parallel as an association dedicated to the design of digital participatory processes, facilitating innovative participatory methodologies to help shape more democratic and just societies and organisations.
The two organisations have been leaders and vanguards in their fields, inspiring many other initiatives and leading the way through creativity and innovation, receiving numerous awards and international recognition.
In the year 2021, Goteo "returns home " and with the union of the two organisations, a new stage begins as Fundación Platoniq from which, in addition to democratising funding, we put democratic culture and collaboration between people at the centre.
We are currently a multidisciplinary team of 22 people working for social transformation. The year we turn 20 in Platoniq and 10 years in Goteo, our challenges, goals and teams come together. And they also become bigger. And we want to celebrate many more years promoting initiatives that put the common good at the centre, working to leave a better world for the generations that come after us.