How do we stimulate citizen participation in societal projects to complement traditional financing techniques?

In a capitalist system, economic growth increases prosperity and improves living standards but generates social and economic inequality, while in a socialist system the economy reduces social and economic inequality but generates less economic growth. The current dominant capitalist system generates a monopoly in societal and urban development, where a few top players capture the role and profit associated with societal development projects.

So what is a way to stimulate back participation of the citizen with their society in this dominant system? Citizen crowdfunding schemes are such a process of raising funds through campaigning for small amounts of money from a large number of individuals to fund a specific initiative, project or business.

The development of the citizen funding market represented by cooperatives and crowdfunding platforms presents an opportunity for public authorities to open private finance through the development of citizen financing schemes to complement and even replace traditional financing models, and offer returns to citizens that invest in local projects of their community. Our challenge at Rebel is infusing this technique into more development projects.

Rebel has worked in a number of citizen financing techniques, such as:

• The citizen funding of a children’s hospital in The Netherlands – the Princes Máxima Paediatric Cancer Hospital. For more information contact Barend Lieshuit (linked).
• The crowd funding of Vidras, which organizes the turnkey supply of technology/equipment for city waste treatment, waste water treatment, energy management (solar, biomass and lighting). For for more information contact Karin Bongers (linked).
• Rikx which is the unique project initiated by Rebel where social projects are financed by companies through their social responsibility investment obligations. For more information contact Wouter Vos (linked).
• Makueni Primary Health care PPP, where communities in Kenya financed their own primary health care. For more information contact Rob Winters (linked).