GIVE A BUCK

'How Small Donations Can Become a Collective Force For Global Good'
Exclusive Interview with Seth Blaustein
Featured in 'ALIGN'
Hosted by Damkianna
Supported by Truth & Justice League

What if changing the world wasn’t the responsibility of a handful of billionaires? What if it belonged to all of us? For years, Seth Blaustein has been exploring a simple but powerful question: How do we make meaningful impact accessible to everyone? As a filmmaker, futurist, entrepreneur, and storyteller, he has helped inspire millions of people to take action for causes that matter. But Seth believes the future of philanthropy isn’t about a few people giving a lot. It’s about millions of people giving a little.

Today, as the Founder and CEO of Dollar Donation Club, Seth is building a new model for collective impact, one that transforms everyday generosity into extraordinary change. It is a vision where anyone can be a philanthropist, and where together, we become the world’s first collective super-philanthropist.
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DAMKIANNA: Seth, thank you so much for joining me on the line for AwareNow Media. Before we dive into Dollar Donation Club, I’d love to learn more about you. I’d love to hear about your journey and some key moments or experiences that, at the time, may not have seemed significant, but were actually preparing you for everything you’re creating at this scale right now.

SETH: Yeah. What comes to mind is when I was 10 years old, the first time I laid my hands on a video camera. It was my dad’s video camera, and I immediately had this knowing that I am a storyteller and that I’m a filmmaker.

That led to becoming a filmmaker at a very young age. I made my first feature film at age 19. I got really into music videos, and I was just fascinated by how you can craft the perception of reality through storytelling.

At a young age, I made this connection. Storytelling is the most powerful technology on the planet. Everything that we experience as a civilization, as an individual species, is through the lens of story. How we create governments, how we create the concept of money and exchange, how we educate our children, all of these are storytelling frameworks and lenses.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but that became the way that I viewed the world. As I grew up and got older, I started asking: If storytelling is the most powerful technology in the world, how can it be used for the most good possible?

That led to reimagining. How do you reimagine the stories of the world? The way we govern, the way we educate, the way we enforce laws, the way we approach medicine even. That led me down the rabbit hole of studying all these paradigms of how we created the world, what the storytelling framework is underneath it, and how we can create new stories that emerge a new way of being that gives rise to human flourishing and planetary flourishing, which is ultimately the goal.

We have a short time on planet Earth. How do we maximize well-being, and how do we minimize suffering?
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​DAMKIANNA: That’s so beautiful, and I love how it ties all the way back to your childhood. Tell me a little bit about how you weave that storytelling into Dollar Donation Club and how this has become a mission. You really talked about zooming out and looking at, on a wide scale, how stories actually shape the world. How do all those pieces fit into what you’re doing here and now?

SETH: My journey of being a storyteller started with filmmaking, but at a young age, I also became fascinated with different mediums of storytelling. There are the traditional mediums: filmmaking, photography, theater, literature. These are what we think of when we think of storytelling.

But I became interested in alternative mediums of storytelling. One that I got very interested in was the medium of experience design. How do you tell a story through the way people move through space and have an experience?

That led me to starting a festival conference called Future Frontiers, which was an immersive story journey of a conference that took you into the future world that is possible with real thought leaders and innovators. It ran for about seven years in Austin, Texas, with about 700 attendees every year. It was at the intersection of reimagining the paradigms of the world and how we reimagine ourselves and our own consciousness.

It brought together a lot of interesting people, and it was a great experiment in a new medium of storytelling. I literally designed the conference as a hero’s journey with rising action, climax, resolution, etc. That idea of applying storytelling to alternative mediums became very interesting to me.

That also led me to seeing entrepreneurship and company as a medium. The idea that a company is a medium of storytelling fascinated me because a company is not in a movie theater, where you experience it and then go back to the “real world.” It actually is the “real world.” The way you interact with the business matters. Businesses are stories that are being expressed. They have consciousness. They have journeys that they invite you into.

That’s what led to me becoming an entrepreneur and a social entrepreneur.

It all converges together: the digital mediums of storytelling and seeing entrepreneurship as a medium of storytelling. I ran a creative agency called Telepathic, and we ended up niching into viral content campaigns for philanthropic projects. We raised around $20 million for different philanthropic initiatives over a five-year period.

I realized that I could craft stories that went viral and raised a lot of money for individual projects.

​There was a moment when I was in India after I had published a campaign video. I got a text message that the video was going very viral. It ended up with 28 million views, completely organic, and helped raise $1 million for that cause.

As that was happening, I had seen this pattern over time where millions of people view the video, learn about the cause, and get involved. But each individual in the comments of those threads, whether it was a Facebook or Instagram video, was feeling individually disempowered. They were saying things like, “Someone should do something about this,” or “How do we get Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk to do something about it?”

There was this feeling of reaching for a billionaire, a government, or someone more powerful who could save the day. And yet, looking at the data of the campaign, 28 million people viewed this. Over 400,000 people shared it.

So what if all 28 million people unified together like a school of fish that could become bigger than a whale?

That’s where the idea led to Dollar Donation Club. What if we could make the school of fish of 28 million people self-aware so that it would swim in a direction together? What if all 28 million people who viewed it just gave a dollar, even one time? But why do it one time when you could give a dollar a month, and it would put no financial burden on any one person? As a whole, that network would create a much bigger monthly donation than an average billionaire’s donation.

Imagine that: $28 million a month without putting any real financial burden on any one person. And yet that school of fish, learning how to swim together, could be reforesting the planet, cleaning up the oceans, feeding children, educating children, and protecting pollinators every single month.

That was part one of the backstory that led to Dollar Donation Club and this idea of creating a collective billionaire philanthropist, which is unified humanity giving small amounts, but collectively solving big global challenges.

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DAMKIANNA: That is so powerful, and the way that it evolved so naturally. I imagine you saw that the traditional model of philanthropy could be made more effective by empowering more people, which is what you’re doing.

I’d love to know a little bit about the community right now around Dollar Donation Club. How many people do you have right now? Also, what are some of the projects? You named some of the topics of what you’re supporting, but are there any particular projects you want to shout out or share that you’re supporting right now?

SETH: Dollar Donation Club proudly has 25,000 members. We have collectively planted over 3 million trees that help alleviate hunger and poverty. We’ve removed over a million pounds of ocean plastic, and we’ve funded over half a million days of education for children living in extreme poverty.

Our current project is funding underwater drones. They’re robots that plant seagrass because seagrass is under extreme danger from pollution and ocean acidification. We’re losing two football fields every hour of seagrass, and it sequesters more carbon per acre than the Amazon rainforest.

It’s a very critical marine ecosystem and Earth technology, as I call it. We don’t have any way of really scaling how to restore it at the rate that we’re destroying it. Right now, the way we plant seagrass is a human being with a seed in their finger and a snorkel, basically just bobbing up and down, planting with their finger. Sometimes they’re actually damaging the soil as they’re walking on it.

These robots cost less than $30,000, and they’re able to very safely and scalably plant seagrass. That’s one very interesting project.

To answer your question at a higher level, about how we’re changing philanthropy, most people have very little trust in the idea of charities or philanthropy. In fact, about 19% of Americans say they have high trust in charities. Most of us believe that it is very hard to understand where the money goes and what it actually does.

So we created the world’s best vetting system that helps you understand what a dollar actually accomplishes. What is the return on donation that actually happens and is measurable? You put money in. What comes out?

For example, a dollar on Dollar Donation Club can remove 2.2 pounds of ocean plastic. It can feed 16 people. It can plant four mangrove trees. It can protect around 187 bees per dollar.

​We find the projects in the world that are the most effective, the most proven, the most scalable, where money goes in and impact goes out. They’re not just good at storytelling and marketing, which is how most nonprofits are raising money effectively. We cut through the noise of that to see who is actually solving the challenge.

And what is the challenge we want to solve? We call it humanity’s checklist.

If you go to Dollar Donation Club and look at humanity’s checklist, it is a big overarching set of goals that we’ve set for humanity across four different funds: Earth, ocean, wildlife, and humanity. It covers pretty much everything that any charity on the planet is covering that’s not political or ideologically divisive.

There are causes that unify everybody: replenishing forests, replenishing seagrass, feeding the hungry, ending curable diseases. There are a lot of people on this planet who are blind and don’t need to be, and roughly $20 to $25 could completely change their life so they wouldn’t be blind anymore.

We focus on goals like this that everybody can agree on. We might just find that if we solve all of those challenges together across political differences and ideological differences, maybe the things we disagree about as a species, the really big ones, would become less difficult to solve.

We’re focused on the things that we can solve together. For example, Donald Trump and Greta Thunberg both got on board with the idea of planting a trillion trees on the planet. We used to have six trillion trees on the planet. We now have three. There’s room for at least one more trillion. There are all kinds of ecosystem and economic benefits to doing so. Great, let’s do that.

We can also feed people with those trees. There are so many different benefits that we can bring through a project like that.

Bringing it all together, Dollar Donation Club is a school of fish, individuals giving as little as a dollar a month. We are collectively pooling that into a laser beam of good every month. We’re pooling those donations to make bigger, more powerful, more leveraged donations to projects that have really outsized impact.

Ideally, we find projects that we call acupuncture points of change, where a minimal amount of money creates the maximum amount of positive benefit.

​DAMKIANNA: I love that there’s transparency and that you have a system for measuring impact. When you look at why people may not trust charities, a lot of donations are tied to tax deductions, but you’re talking about measurable impact and really circling back to empowering people. It is so easy to sit back and say, “There’s too much. How can I possibly make an impact?” You’ve created a system for many people to make a measurable, positive impact.

Like you said, a dollar a month is doable for a large majority of people. For people listening, this AwareNow Media community is made up of millions of people around the world who are really interested in human causes. Everything you’ve outlined here is exactly that. What you all support at Dollar Donation Club is beyond party lines. It’s about human betterment and making everything better for all humans.

How can people get involved?

SETH: Join Dollar Donation Club.

We say that the Dollar Donation Club is for those who give a buck, and we need to inspire everyone to give a buck about the world, about their neighbors, and about the planet.

You can join for as little as $1 a month. It’s very easy. We have eight-year-olds who give a dollar of their allowance every month, and they’re tracking how many trees they’ve planted and how many pounds of ocean plastic they’ve removed.

You’re right that we’re in a time where it feels like the problems are so much bigger than can be solved. That leads to this helplessness. These are big challenges that we care deeply about, and yet we feel more disempowered than ever about how we individually can make a difference.

​​The paradigm shift is from me making a heroic difference myself, which is kind of the last epoch of history, to asking: What would happen if 5 million people cared about this together? That is exponentially more powerful than anything one individual could do.

We are moving into, I think, an age of the power of collectives and schools of fish, and how we create unified consensus around solving global challenges.

Let’s create a collective billionaire philanthropist that is not just leading their next business venture with philanthropy, which is often what philanthropy at scale does, unfortunately, but is truly for people and for the planet, for the soil, for the species, for the ocean, for all the ecosystems.

We are on a spaceship in this beautiful universe, and to keep the services of this spaceship thriving, there’s a lot of work to do. We can do it together. It really is possible to make massive shifts and massive change with as little as $1, $5, or $10 a month.

So I hope I inspire you, and I encourage you to join Dollar Donation Club. Join our school of fish and see how good it feels to give a buck. ∎

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Learn more about Dollar Donation Club: dollardonationclub.com