For this week’s community spotlight, I spoke with Craig Anderson. Last year, he started Happy Kids Dirty Hands, a platform that takes crypto donations, including XYO, to support the Garden Team and Garden Education programs at his children’s school. Since then, Happy Kids Dirty Hands has expanded to support other extra-curricular programs at the Sacramento school.
Where are you from? What do you do?
I grew up in southwest CO and have spent all of my adult life in various locations throughout the inter-mountain west including CO, MT, AZ, and now Sacramento, CA. I’ve been living in Sacramento since 2008 employed as a hydrologist working in the always interesting California water arena. I primarily analyze large physical datasets, develop and review hydroecological computer models, and coordinate on statewide real-time water operations for the protection of threatened and endangered fish species.
When did you first get involved in blockchain/crypto?
2013, based on friendly advice — it was more of a whim than anything. Turned out to be quite a bit more than a whim. Pretty intensely since winter 2016.
When did you first get involved in XYO? What inspired you to make the first purchase, whether it was tokens, shares, or a mining kit?
I first bought the XY3 from XY Findables in 2016. I purchased XYO , Reg A+ offering, and multiple kits in April 2018. XYO is where my geography geek and crypto dork crossed paths. My degrees are in geography with a GIS background, and I was looking to reinvest profits from the recent crypto market spike. At that time, Proof of Location consensus was a new concept to me. I dug in and liked what I saw from a business plan perspective. But more importantly, I recognized the potential breakthrough that XYO could possibly lead on.
What excites you most about the project?
Everything. I go down my list and check off all the desirable elements for a successful business, a fruitful investment opportunity, and awesome community building potential. Team growth during a down market. Facile pivots during ICO, with ETH value plummeting, by extending into GAMMA . Constant milestone achievement and product releases. Community engagement via both social media and with the inaugural Spatial conference. Plus, I’m just really excited about the tech. The recent focus on dataism and dataistic networks has been outstanding. Super cool to, again, watch the founders and their entire growing team shift on the fly and embrace emerging technologies and concepts.
Are there any potential use cases that you’ve seen in your day-to-day life?
So many. Maybe too many — I can’t keep them all straight! For example, a school safety platform, combined with a parent pickup app, where individual schools run their own archivist/diviner combos facilitating a semi-private network answering their community’s requests with their own data. You could teach the kids how to run every component of it. It would be an amazingly rich tech project combined with creating financial skills and awareness around digital assets.
Tell me a little more about Happy Kids Dirty Hands — what inspired you to start the organization? Where does crypto get involved?
Happy Kids Dirty Hands is an educational fundraiser that accepts digital assets as donations. Initially, I was focused on supporting the experiential learning curriculum at my kids’ school via Garden Education and the school Garden Team. We have since broadened our reach to include other non-garden related programs in the school including recent Aspiring Builders and Olympic Hopefuls Challenges. I was inspired to start the campaign in October 2018 by 3 things; 1) my kids’ Title I school’s (low income — free meals etc) repeated failures to meet annual fundraising goals with traditional methods via the 501c3 registered non-profit PTA, 2) the ongoing financial and structural issues within our larger school district, which is now at risk of state takeover, the largest ever in state history, and 3) my desire to do more with Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) than just speculate in the wild west.
In the summer of 2018, I started watching a couple individuals emerging on social media fundraising with microdonations, primarily with the XRP Tip Bot, and the light bulb popped. I could help my kids’ school by starting a crypto fundraising effort while getting more engaged in DLT tech on many different levels. So I spent a few months researching, testing the various emerging microdonation and web monetization platforms, and watching the various crypto communities on social media. I decided to go for it and launched the campaign on social media, Twitter primarily, on Halloween 2018. I had live within a few weeks soon thereafter.
The response has been overwhelming and the results truly amazing, but not surprising actually. I saw the giving potential in the largely anonymous cryptosphere and knew it far outstripped anything my little school community could generate. There were really very few peopIe doing this, and I thought it could be a great way to get in on the ground floor of something potentially quite big. I was fortunate enough to get in early with a newly forming charitable giving group called the Good Souls Group (Twitter: ), formed by Cyle Moore (Twitter: @). To date he has raised over 65,000 XRP for St. Jude research, with official St. Jude support of the XRP Tip Bot.
With the support and skills of various GSG members and the support of numerous crypto communities out there, Happy Kids Dirty Hands has raised over 4,000 USD equivalent in 5 months during a severe bear market. With a portion of those proceeds, we have purchased shovels, pitchforks, wheelbarrows, a worm composting bin, vegetable starts, drills, sawhorses, carpentry supplies, and more. We have filled out 2 struggling DonorsChoose projects, Aspiring Builders and Olympic Hopefuls. In early May, we will be purchasing and installing a new storage and work shed, much anticipated by the school. And by fall, we hope to have raised enough funds to purchase and install a working greenhouse. We accept multiple digital assets, including XYO, and accept direct donations to public wallets, via various social media tipping platforms (more on the next question), and via our website . And yes, we do accept USD directly there as well.
How can people become more involved in HKDH or learn more?
I’m active on several social media platforms, though I run most of the active fundraising through Twitter. Our website also contains a full list of digital assets with cold QR codes (XRP, XYO, TRX, NANO, BAT, BTT, XLM, , LTC, VET, VTHO, others), social media QR codes, goals and accomplishments, and a photo gallery.
is also Coil enabled (stream XRP), is a verified brave publisher (auto-contribute/ tip BAT), and is HummingPay (donate TRX) and SatoshiPay (donate XLM) enabled. Web stores with product proceeds (or portions thereof) supporting HKDH and the other 5 GSG charities include and .
Published at Wed, 03 Apr 2019 23:02:34 +0000
