We work with mission driven organizations and individuals, providing an array of services that support social impacts.
Services
Convene
We bring together a diverse set of voices and participants to develop effective strategies for our clients. Through careful curation and attention to detail, we generate points of shared interest and potential cooperation across disciplines, and connect needs with different forms of capital.
Incubate
We work with our clients to clarify the vision and desired impact for a particular project or aim. We welcome and incorporate complexity across areas of expertise, understand and align stakeholder interests and identify key resources, both available and needed, to develop an executable plan for adoption.
Create
When the construction materials used are carefully selected, properly aligned and held together, GROUT helps organizations and communities of shared interest create beautiful things.
What this might look like:
Project Definition and Coordination
Strategic Planning Meetings
Impact Strategies for Products and Services
Implementing Novel Collaboration Tools
Coordinating Input from Experts and Professionals
Resource Identification and Mobilization
Engagement Strategies
Volunteer Recruitment, Development, Management
Event Curation
Conference Design and Planning
Workshop design and Facilitation
Visioning Sessions
Public Communication
BlockChain for Good
Current Projects
We have conceptualized, incubated and designed several projects that share the goal of empowering community through cooperation and collaboration. We strive to create scenarios where individuals work together, sharing human and social capital as a common resource for shared benefit. These exemplar GROUT projects feature and propose solutions for creating value in different types of “community,” for example, within established organizations, across a decentralized network and among actors in a commodities market.
STRUT WorkFields is a revolutionary blockchain-enabled communications platform designed to drive deeper engagement and effective cooperation in charitable sector organizations. The STRUT smart contract protocol establishes “proof of completion” of member-identified and member-performed activities that can be tracked and recorded. Taken together, this body of confirmed member activity creates an internally-defined, generative value structure for action and impact. By providing STRUT WorkFields to organizations they fund, donors foster a more integrated and cohesive community of shared interest among various stakeholders and gain a deeper connection to the work being done by connecting funds with specific action. In addition, STRUT WorkFields can link several funded projects and organizations together by affiliation, allowing a wider universe of members to interact in a trusted ecosystem for sharing resources, information and knowledge. We created a startup entity, Workfields Incorporated, to pursue a commercialization strategy as a joint venture with our technology partner, Carii, Inc.
GROUT was a founding sponsor of Bluefields, a startup company whose mission is to sustainably scale global production of sea vegetables, principally kelp, for the >US$10 billion global human consumption market. With its industry partners, Bluefields will create an electronic marketplace (EMP) to activate mechanisms central to growing markets in general: buyer and seller aggregation, price transparency, and higher liquidity. Bluefields will offer a coinEMP, an EMP powered by a tokenized blockchain distributed ledger. A coinEMP leverages open, distributed protocols to facilitate data-sharing and peer-to-peer transactions, a vast improvement over transactions managed by proprietary, monolithic, “trusted” third parties. A decentralized, redundant, auditable network will not only give buyers and sellers an ownership interest, but will also enable guaranteed transactions, futures contracts, product traceability and sustainable reinvestment, the Bluefields project will be seeking seed capital investment in H1 2019.
Women in Hospitality United (WiHU) was born of the #MeToo movement and the belief that there is an urgent need for evolution in the hospitality industry. The initial approach included a series of five convenings designed to surface key issue areas among community stakeholders.
From these gatherings emerged the Solution Sprint. A first-of-its-kind initiative, the Solution Sprint is a one-day, crowdsourced event designed to drive resources, expertise, and attention to solving community-identified challenges. We looked to the tech and design fields for analogies in collective problem-solving and modeled the Sprint on a hackathon or design spring approach.
In parallel to the event design and execution we lead the WiHU team on their path to building a truly inclusive organization with 501(c)(3) status. We worked with WiHU’s leadership to develop their mission statement, branding, areas of expertise along with creation of their board and advisory teams. The WiHU project has garnered national press coverage in The New Yorker, Mic.com, Civil Eats and Cherry Bombe.
Past Work
GROUT has developed a platform for creating leadership opportunities by connecting civically-engaged residents in a trusted forum encouraging the purposeful exchange of assets throughout the Empire State. Residents across New York State are working to build strong communities. But locally-available resources are not always in hand to bring about a solution. The NY GRID establishes a mechanism for connecting people with defined needs with people having access to resources that might meet those needs. When reconstituted, the NY GRID will be administered through a newly-created 501(c)(3) charitable organization.