DeCiv Fund

Legacy Lobby3 account is rebranding to DeCiv Fund! A public goods grant program and advocacy accelerator for the innovators of tomorrow. Supporting @opencivics

[DeCiv Fund @decivfund]

@clinamenic @gitcoin @OpenCivics @JournoDao @daocoalition @metagov_project @RiverDonProject @VoiceDeckDAO @EthForestDAO @OurBloomNetwork @0xUrbanika @MoosResearch @citizenchat0x @agroforestDAO @CommonsEngine @CommonAgency We encourage others to consider donating to the amazing projects in the OpenCivics Consortium!

https://t.co/UFGutuGmmo

[8Veda Research 🦉 @8veda_research]

Why Anthropic is so valuable, Gavin S. Baker explains insane statistic about its revenue growth. @GavinSBaker

[brooke - vibecamp 6/18-21 @gptbrooke]

A story about a house that is far more than a house, the great moldocalypse of 2025, and a request for aid

In 2023, I moved into an intentional living community house in SF called The Embassy. It's a confusing thing to tell people who haven't already heard of it: "I live at The Embassy!" "Oh uhhh huh…how does that…work?"

It also fundamentally changed my life.

The House

The Embassy is a difficult place to describe. The house itself was built in 1905, and was furnished via purchases from Facebook Marketplace, street finds, random bits of local art, and lots and lots of plants. There's a grandeur to it, but it's a lived-in, eclectic one. Somehow, it felt just as right to find famous intellectual luminaries in the salon as it was to stumble upon broke witches putting on experimental art shows in the basement.

I'm not very motivated by grandeur. It feels nice to live in, but if the culture isn't there, grandeur alone is not enough to keep me around.

The Culture

Culture is a notoriously difficult thing to put into words, so I'll attempt to communicate some of what the culture of The Embassy felt like to me with some snapshots:

Living in this community was a bootcamp in emotionally intelligent communication for me. An EQ accelerator, to use even heavier SF-speak. Watching the way conflict was navigated - always from a place of deep care - and the way communal sensemaking was done led to transformations in my ability to apply those skills throughout the rest of my life.

Walking into that kitchen often felt like walking through a portal to another world. Conversations about society, grief, capitalism (pro and against!), coordination; beauty and darkness and a raw grace. One feeling I remember having over and over was a desire to move to an adjacent room to sit more comfortably - and not saying anything out of fear that my words would cause people to remember their errands and day jobs and shake off the spell.

I've never lived in a community where one of the core shared values was so obviously one of mutual support. You could touch it, it infused everything. I remember once making a joke about how I found it hard to feed myself sometimes, and someone immediately asked "what signs can we look for to know when you're hungry, but having a hard time preparing food?"

We took turns being heavily involved in the house. There was so much grace for when someone was sick, or feeling overwhelmed, or just needed a bit of a break.

Relationships were built slowly, and became so rich for it. A quiet wave in the early hours of the morning "hi hello i see you". A moment out on the porch in the sunlight, where someone pauses on their way out and stays to chatter about nothing, about everything. Reading out loud to each other, writing user guides to learn how to support one another better.

Gentle. That's a good word for The Embassy. So much of it felt gentle - but not saccharine, nothing fake. The kind of gentleness that is sometimes the landing point for people who have seen the most darkness, and decided to choose the light anyway.

I always described it as an oasis in the heart of San Francisco. It's a weird little bubble of intellectuals and academics who reject the soulless push to grind and built a real home that is still somehow a vibrant community hub. No one immersed in the culture of The Embassy will ask what you do for work as soon as they meet you.

The Mold

And now, the reason I'm not there right now.

In January, I brought my cat Pico with me to housesit for my parents for a couple of weeks. While I was gone, there were historic levels of rain in San Francisco. Parts of the house erupted in leaks, and people suddenly started experiencing pretty severe and immediate physical reactions. Swelling, itching faces, headaches.

The rains had caused a massive bloom of several types of toxic mold.

I decided to stick around at my parent's house while people still in the city rallied to get the house tested and the mold remediated. As I waited, I thought back to how the winter had gone for me.

For 4-5 months, I had been making comments to friends like "I'm surprised I'm being hit so hard by the political landscape, it's not fitting my model of myself" and "where did my confidence go?"

I did have some big, difficult life things going on! And secretly wondered if I had just lost my spark somehow. During the winter, my periods also suddenly changed. They became shorter, and noticeably more frequent. "Did I turn some age-related fertility corner?" I fretted.

The way I'd been feeling was unusual enough for me that I decided to get a mycotoxin panel done, even though I'd been out of the house for three weeks at that point, and had been gone for the big severe bloom.

This was a urine test, so it seemed unlikely to me that I would have had enough toxins in my body to still be shedding them at a detectable level. However, I came up positive for Ochratoxin A and Gliotoxin.

These toxins affect multiple systems in the body - from immune function and brain health to hormones and energy levels. What really caught my attention was learning they can inhibit dopamine and increase anxiety! I decided at that point that I should spend a few months out of the house, to monitor changes in symptoms.

I've been out of the house for two months now, and taking a range of supplements that help with detox. I feel pretty confident now that a huge amount of what was making life hard for me over the winter was really just mold exposure.

Recovery is nonlinear and can take 2-3 months for moderate exposure cases, up to a year or two for really severe instances. I'm now at a point where symptom regressions are far enough between and discrete enough that it's actually been fascinating to observe. I just had a couple week stretch where I noticed little things like: wanting to get up right when I woke up, having more energy to exercise, the deep joy I feel when I think about all the good things in my life being easier to access again. More resilience in the face of missteps or hard things happening.

Then I had another period where suddenly I was sleeping 9-10 hours a day instead of my normal 7, feeling tired and foggy and having memory issues, GI problems - and what I found most interesting: my emotional responses to life changed! I went from reacting to difficulties with "oh that's not good, hmm this is a way I might be able to fix it" to "oh that's not good that must mean this whole thing is DOOMED." (for the health folks, this happened twice recently. Both while traveling, so possibly related to travel stress- OR because I stopped taking two of the supplements while traveling each time - 3-5 g of spirulina/chlorella + the Bryan Johnson Longevity drink mix, daily. Next trip I am going to keep taking those every day and test which it was)

I don't know if I can accurately convey just how crazy this has been!! Watching it happen, correlated with physical symptoms - when for months I had just been feeling like maybe I was just broken somehow. It just crept up so slowly. And now in addition to everything else, my period is showing early signs of normalizing, which is helpful in pulling me out of wondering if it’s all in my head.

Anyway if you’re struggling with weird and vague health issues maybe check your house for mold hahah

The Embassy was the thing keeping me rooted in SF.
This mold situation happened to take place at a time when I was feeling some unrelated pulls to the east coast, so for now I'm going to feel out where I'm going next. I would LOVE to come back, but I'm not very useful to the world when I'm too tired to think and crumbling in the face of every hard thing that happens. We're feeling really good about the remediation we've had done, but it might not be the best place to live for people who are particularly sensitive to mold (some people in the house have experienced no symptoms!)

The Ask

Remediation has been EXPENSIVE. We've had holes cut in walls, removed parts of ceilings, taken out carpet. All while the house was empty and not pulling in income from rent at anywhere near the levels we were before.

Despite not living there, and not having anything close to a high income, I've chosen to continue paying rent for now just because I love The Embassy so much (and I'm fortunate enough to have parents who live in California that were willing to put me up in the interim for free).

The Embassy has been around for 12 years, and has had a quiet but global and very real impact on the world. We've had many tens of thousands of people come through there, staying for a few hours to months or years. Many leave forever marked, having glimpsed a way to do communal living well. People have come to study how we manage to keep the kitchen so clean, the way the architecture of the house contributes to strengthening social fabric.

Projects were born from that kitchen table that have spread to have impact on a national level: efforts to aid in local and global coordination between co-living communities; restorative justice projects, resources, and housing. Haight St. Commons, Alt J, Template and Sigil houses all trace their lineage back to The Embassy.

It's a rare place where the toxic parts of progressiveness never took hold, but there's nonetheless a deep drive towards progress, visions of a brighter future, peace, and globalism. The culture of this community, so bound up within the physical structure of the house itself, is a hugely positive one for San Francisco.

We've finished remediation (🥳) but we need to raise $50,000 to cover repairing the walls/floors/etc that were damaged in the process - and to set up robust systems for monitoring potential problem areas going forward.

Please only contribute if you can do so without it being a burden - but if the way I spoke about this house, this magical entity so different from standard SF fare, resonates with you, and you want to help ease this process for us, please consider donating through the link below.

The world is a better place for The Embassy existing.

Thank you for reading, sharing, and supporting our home and this community 🥰

[Zarinah Agnew @zarinahagnew]

𝙷𝚎𝚕𝚙 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚎𝚖𝚋𝚊𝚜𝚜𝚢 𝚛𝚎𝚘𝚙𝚎𝚗!

Dear Friends and Community Supporters,
For the past 12 years, the Embassy has served as more than just a home to its residents—it has been a cornerstone of our broader community, hosting gatherings, workshops, mutual aid initiatives, and creating space for connection and collaboration.
> We have just gone through a MASSIVE mold remediation & whilst the house is drier than it's ever been, we also have a lot of repairs to do 📷. This involved taking down three ceilings and floors and making a lottttt of holes in things .. it's been a wild few weeks. We are now reopening and need some help getting over the hump.
>> The Embassy has always operated on principles of mutual aid and community solidarity. When neighbors have needed support, we've opened our doors. Now, we're turning to our extended community for halp..

>>> The total cost of proper remediation & repair is over 100k, we have most of this in our emergency maintenance fund, but we need help bridging the gap. Every contribution, regardless of size, brings us closer to being able to finish the repairs& continuing our mission of community service.
🪐Make a financial contribution!
🦊 If you can't contribute, that's ok, please consider sharing this fundraiser with others who value community spaces
😍 Buy a ticket to our Mold Themed reopening fundraising party! (tickets coming soon - where we will be serving tips and

https://t.co/g05vKKF8tj

[rithikha @rithikxa_]

The Hayek and Whitehead overlap is also surprising to me, but this is worth the read. Hayek takes Whitehead's observations on indv. cognitive habits, expanding them to the institutional scale: Markets as civilizational epistemic devices.

https://t.co/rMcuz1x8CH

[clinamenic @clinamenic]

more like incelerate @solana

[clinamenic @clinamenic]

Looking for orgs who want to support research into methodology for P2P philanthropy and impact assessment. Proud to already count @lex_DAO and @SuperBenefitDAO as sponsors!

Sponsors donate small sums (e.g. $500), and I address their research interests.

https://t.co/2ziNMQAwcJ

[OpenCivics @OpenCivics]

OpenCivics exists to close the gap between innovators & community organizers, leveraging the power of web3 to bootstrap local participatory democracy and pro-social economies.

Our Collaborative Research Round aims to support that work!

What kind of projects should apply? 🧵👇

[OpenCivics @OpenCivics]

Applications open tomorrow! Are you a researcher or innovator seeking funding to produce open source research in the civic domain?

We’d love to fund your important work! Keep an eye out for an email and formal announcement this week!

[clinamenic @clinamenic]

To celebrate Independence Day in an open-source spirit, I converted all 85 Federalist papers into markdown and brought them into an obsidian vault.

Still need to double-check the discourse around attribution for some of these, but voilà:

[DeCiv Fund @decivfund]

@clinamenic @gitcoin @OpenCivics @JournoDao @daocoalition @metagov_project @RiverDonProject @VoiceDeckDAO @EthForestDAO @OurBloomNetwork @0xUrbanika @MoosResearch @citizenchat0x @agroforestDAO @CommonsEngine @CommonAgency We encourage others to consider donating to the amazing projects in the OpenCivics Consortium!

https://t.co/UFGutuGmmo

[clinamenic @clinamenic]

I just donated these projects in @gitcoin round 20, including the @OpenCivics round!

@JournoDao
@daocoalition
@metagov_project
@RiverDonProject
@voicedeckDAO
@ethforestDAO
@ourbloomnetwork
@0xUrbanika
@MoosResearch
@citizenchat0x
@agroforestdao
@commonsengine
@CommonAgency

[DeCiv Fund @decivfund]

Just published the Lobby3 retrospective! TLDR below
https://t.co/TpKaIxCDqb
#DAO #LessonLearned

[OpenCivics @OpenCivics]

OpenCivics Consortium Round 02 is live!

We’re giving away $41,000 in matching funds to critically underfunded civic utilities thanks to @gitcoin and @decivfund.

This round’s theme: collaboration and coordination.

To learn more and apply, visit https://t.co/vhNdVHUv0v.

[WaaP, Wallet as a Protocol @WaaPxyz]

What if anyone could contribute to public goods with just an email?

[OpenCivics @OpenCivics]

We are honored & excited to announce that OpenCivics was selected by the Gitcoin Community Council as 1 of 5 Community Rounds to receive $25,000 in Matching Funds.

Thanks to @decivfund & @gitcoin, our next Grant Round will provide $45,000+ in matching funds for civic innovation!

[WaaP, Wallet as a Protocol @WaaPxyz]

With Silk you don't have to worry about losing your keys

[WaaP, Wallet as a Protocol @WaaPxyz]

Happy Friday 🫡

[WaaP, Wallet as a Protocol @WaaPxyz]

Protecting your identity is important and grandma deserves to understand too. What should we call our ZK proof verifications in the app?

[WaaP, Wallet as a Protocol @WaaPxyz]

Loving dev talks from .@ceramicnetwork this morning 🥰

[S El Damaty @hebbianloop]

pretty stoked to be presenting at the inaugural sciOS event as part of the @descieth Summit! will show a demo of whats possible with Holonym tomorrow at 1:30 MT

https://t.co/4qJFXxeXJN