Photo credit: Flickr user Kharied.

Knight is investing in Neighbor.ly, a crowdfunding platform that brings people together to support community projects. The following guest blog post is written by Jase Wilson, Neighbor.ly’s founder.

It’s tough work being a local government in the United States these days. Cuts in federal and state grants, stagnant tax bases and diminished borrowing continue to produce budget shortfalls. Scarce funding from traditional sources force communities to under fund, stall or abandon civic projects. That’s bad for us all: Those projects improve quality of life for citizens, while creating value and jobs in the process, which in turn helps fund other government activities. The result has been a downward spiral for many of our nation’s communities.

At Neighbor.ly, our mission is to help these communities continue to pay for these civic projects by leveraging the power of crowdfunding and other sources. Past funding opportunities have addressed different issues: community-wide wifi access, bike paths, even light rail to improve public transit. By allowing people to pick and support the projects they care about most, we hope to help people continue to improve their lives by improving their places.

Today we are moving a step closer to that goal because of a $175,000 grant from Knight Foundation. It’s fitting that we are announcing this while attending the Points of Light CivicX accelerator. As we plan the future of  Neighbor.ly, we are learning from some of the best and brightest minds in civic technology, working out the most effective ways to help fund civic projects. We’re shoulder to shoulder with seven other extraordinary civic tech startups, all of which share our vision of doing well by doing good.

Eight months ago, I grabbed a coffee with Damian Thorman, Knight’s national program director, at YJ’s Snackbar, the Kansas City coffee shop where Neighbor.ly was conceived in early 2012. Something he said has stuck with me ever since: He views part of Knight Foundation’s role as addressing market failures. For example, Knight has supported civic technology innovations that are too new for traditional investors to take a risk on. Today, we are thankful that Knight took a chance on us, so that we can help address another kind of market failure — when taxes and borrowing are no longer able to sustain community enriching civic projects.

With Knight’s support we are able to build a much better system. The expanded Neighbor.ly will include tools for communities to propose, create, manage and fulfill their own campaigns. It will enhance usability and add new funding sources. Perhaps most exciting, we will be able to lower our platform fee to a fraction of the industry standard, 5 percent, to something much more appropriate for civic crowdfunding.

It’s been 11 short months of operation for Neighbor.ly, and communities have already raised over $100,000 directly through our prototype system. This amount has helped to spur an additional $400,000 for those projects. That may seem miniscule in the context of multi-million dollar crowdfunding campaigns for things like cool watches and reviving television shows as movies, but these numbers give us great hope. They prove that people are willing to contribute to the greater good, and that people and small businesses are willing to invest in places if given the means and the reasons to do so. If we can help raise that much with our current product, what amounts can we help raise with a more robust system?

That is the question Knight Foundation is helping us to answer. We look forward to finding out, and helping Knight communities green-light the projects they care about most.

By Jase Wilson