A Second-Chance Cardano Hub

Weld Seattle helps people returning home from jail or prison rebuild their lives after they have fulfilled their sentences. Helping a person released from incarceration find a safe place to live, a job, and crucial services is critical to reducing homelessness and recidivism, as well as helping to ensure stability for their children, families, and larger communities.

Weld provides safe transitional recovery housing in a clean and sober environment, pathways to employment, and reconnection to community. This is the simple mission of Weld. It's transformational work that keeps people from slipping through the cracks. Members work, volunteer, they attend community meetings. But mostly, they belong, believe, and become. What Weld is doing is working.

A bottom Line? Weld's recidivism rate is less than 3% while the national average is 77%

We are going further. We are building 1426, a new reentry resource center, it will provide connection to housing, employment, mental health, and recovery resources for system-impacted individuals.

The building, located in the heart of Seattle's International District, was donated for Weld's use in 2019 by Sarah and Richard Barton, Founder and CEO of Zillow Group and founder of Expedia and Glassdoor.

1426's services will also include health and wellness programming, connection to legal resources, and deep mentorship. In addition, the center plans to offer adult education classes, family reunification assistance, connection to public services, entrepreneurship curriculum and trauma-informed yoga, art, and music therapy.

With your support, we will be able to offer also a Cardano Community Hub where individuals can learn to build on the blockchain. Learning and building on the blockchain offers a fresh start for these individuals, new freedom, a place where they can learn and grow and contribute their ideas, their perspectives, their experiences. It gives them an opportunity to learn and participate in where society is going, not just where it's been.

Blockchain offers real freedom and transparency, an opportunity to positivity, to feed their family, and demonstrate how they have grown and changed, giving back to the community.

We imagine a staff-supported networked Multimedia Tech Hub offering access, classes, and practica. Some of our clients have been inside through the bulk of the internet revolution and so we will need to walk with them through the current digital ecosystem. We will meet people where ever they are and bring them into being functional members of the digital world. We serve our community in both English and Spanish.

We are seeking funds to partially cover the salary of a competent, informed, experienced staff resource for .5 year. Additionally, we will use the funds to buy and employ any Cardano-specific network architecture, servers, safety and security capacity as well as bridge any necessary gap between the machines we will source elsewhere and the technical capacity necessary to establish and maintain nodes and an effective blockchain learning environment. A project we would be interested in would be to set up a SPO as a learning project.

We provide currently provide wrap-around services in English, Spanish and Tagalog. We would offer Cardano classes in all of our service languages.

We have lined up other partners (MSFT, Expedia) to support our work by helping with basic digital infrastructure, like printers, machines, displays, speakers, etc; we are seeking this project with Project Catalyst for blockchain-specific capacity building.

Relevant to the Cardano world, we wish to teach and to offer supportive practice in Staking, Wallets, NFTs, Smart contracts, Plutus, Crypto, DAOs, DeFi, Dapps, Web3, Oracles, Use cases. In the broader space, we see needs to meet in programming languages, web/app development, AI, security, IOT, community, remote learning, creation, digital hygiene and literacy.

To Summarize:

Impact- We see Cardano development as a viable path to income creation and community inclusion for system-impacted individuals. We will be already setting up a Computer Hub, we are asking for support to add Cardano-specific resources to the offer.

Feasibility- We have entire teams assigned to Construction and Programs. We need only Cardano-specific support to add Cardano classes/practica to our curriculum.

Auditability- We will send construction, and Community hub pictures and classroom shots to the Cardano project auditors. We can also send personal impact letters as well and longer-term career updates. It'll be easy for us because we are proposing support for physical space with real people.  If someone wishes to see our work, and you are in Seattle, we can coordinate an in-person visit.

Phase 1- By 3 months we expect to:

• Be completing structural upgrades to the building

• Be working through the RFP process for additional Partner organizations and Finalizing details on Partner and resource mix

• Be developing the specific curriculum for Cardano-specific, Blockchain-generally, Development

Phase 2- By 6 months we expect to:

• Have completed construction which will include, at a minimum: Creative Spaces, Coffee Shop, Multiuse/Multimedia spaces, Tech Hub, Breakout Rooms, Pantry

• Be American Disability Act compliant.

• Be providing services, programs, and classes. This Hub would be fully operational to our clients by May 2022.

Phase 3- By 12 months we expect to:

• Be fully operational, delivering impact and opportunity. We expect to be advertising our Hub capability to the outside world.

Our hope is that this entry point to the blockchain generally and Cardano specifically, will not only deliver as-yet-unimagined trust and verifiability utility but together we act as a model of what digital freedom actually means, putting to work and leveraging the latent talent and all the potential we first locked up and then locked out.

The skills we develop would inform how to efficiently teach blockchain tech to the under-resourced and marginalized among us. The Chains don't care about credit scores, social networks, where you're born, who your parents are, job history, cultural idiosyncrasies, or what you look like, but do care about usefulness and utility, and skill. The Chains are the future and for our best collective future, we want to take advantage of all of the diversity of our talent and human capital, wherever it lies and whomever it lies within.  Millions have done their time, learned the lessons, and have value to contribute and families to feed, we want to help drive that reality that they can.

Additionally, we are willing to partner with other second-chance organizations beyond the Pacific Northwest that wish to learn from our hard-knock experiences and hard-won successes.