Social Alpha Foundation is proud to introduce our education grantee, Aparna Krishnan, head of Education from Blockchain at Berkeley (B@B), co-head of Education from Blockchain at Berkeley (https://blockchain.berkeley.edu/), a 2018 Thiel Fellowship and Social Alpha Foundation grantee, a co-founder of open-source blockchain research lab Mechanism Labs.

From April 25–28, Aparna paid Hong Kong a visit and presented a series of lectures and workshops targeting faculty and students of various Universities as well as the Hong Kong Blockchain community at large. The goal of this Education Grant is to cultivate advanced Blockchain skill sets and thought leadership and establish a meaningful partnership between the Berkeley and Hong Kong Blockchain communities.

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Education program development in third-world countries is extremely difficult, due to high-demand of human resource, inefficient paper-based administration system and poor-functioning subsidy payment system. Charities spent numerous amount of human resource and funding but unable to achieve their goals in the short term.

Amply (https://www.amply.tech/)is a not-for-profit project that is building a digital identity and subsidy management system on the Ethereum Blockchain for pre-schools in South Africa. By using Amply, the underprivileged children can receive sovereign ID and gain access to quality preschool education and financial support.

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A USD $30,000 grant to winners of Social Alpha Foundation Blockchain for Social Impact Hackathon at The Impact Summit (http://www.theimpactsummit.org/), which took place from June 1st-3rd in New York. The aim of the event is to inspire and empower the next generation of social entrepreneurs by bringing together 350 computer science students from top 20 universities in United States to explore how they can leverage their technical talents to create social impact.

The winners were The Exponent Project (1st place), Docklist (2nd place), and Wishing Well (3rd place).    More details

New York, September 26. Social Alpha Foundation is honoured to support Blockchain Symposium — a seminar organised by the Consulate-General of The Netherlands and UNOPS (United Nations Office for Project Services). During the symposium, several key topics will be discussed by Blockchain experts , in particular Financial Service, Digital Identity, land registration and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) More Details

The Blockchain Trust Accelerator (BTA),a leading global platform for harnessing blockchain technology to solve social impact challenges, has received a six-figure grant from SAF to build its latest project known as The Impact Ledger, the definitive registry of social impact blockchain projects, spanning the nonprofit, public, and for-profit sectors. The Impact Ledger will promote understanding and flow of resources to blockchain for social impact projects. The Impact Ledger will also facilitate access to information about projects in specific verticals, including education, health and environment.More Details

SAF announced USD$150K grant for Yale openlab, a newly launched joint initiative between the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale and the Yale Center for Business and the Environment. The Yale Openlab aims to create a university program that meaningfully applies blockchain technology to climate change solution-building via three streams of work: 1) incubated blockchain projects that address real-world climate challenges, 2) co-curricular technical training that equips individuals who are knowledgeable about climate change subject matter with technical blockchain skills, and 3) mapping and reporting on blockchain’s potential to shape a healthy resilient society. More Details