Ryan’s Hope and Moms Stop the Harm simcoe.com
Ryan’s Hope and Moms Stop the Harm, Simcoe County host International Overdose Awareness Day remembrance events Aug. 31
Tag: HOPE
Hope Shores Alliance hosting landlord events
Hope Shores Alliance will host a pair of events next month geared toward landlords and property managers.
The first event is slated for Sept. 14 beginning at 6 p.m. at the Hope Shores Alliance administrative office, 3022 U.S.-23 South, Suite D in Alpena.
The second event is scheduled for Sept. 21 at 6 p.m. at Hope Shores’ Oscoda outreach and services office, 8002-B N. Alaska Street in Oscoda.
For more information call Debby McKay at 989-356-2560 ext.112.
Publishers hope NFTs will increase event revenue, but slow adoption of blockchain tech leaves attendees unsure
This article is part of a 10-piece Digiday series that explores the value of NFTs and blockchain technology. Explore the full series here.
In-person events are back and some crypto news publishers are integrating the blockchain technologies they report on into their conference businesses to increase ticket sales, reward audience participation and sell more sponsorship deals.
For some publishers, that has meant turning event tickets into NFTs and gamifying events with opportunities to earn tokens throughout the venue as potential strategies. Whether they are successful is another story. The slow-going adoption of the blockchain by mass consumers — and even among Web3-native attendees of crypto conferences — means that audiences are not guaranteed to participate in these new innovations while at events.
Earlier this year, crypto publisher Blockworks set a goal to reach $20 million in revenue in 2022 by embracing blockchain technology in its business, in part by turning VIP tickets to its Permissionless conference last May into NFTs. CoinDesk, another crypto news site, integrated its proprietary participation token DESK into its Consensus conference in June to reward attendees for engaging with sessions, sponsors and other activities.
Now that the height of conference season has passed, here were some of their takeaways:
- Blockworks sold all of its 555 VIP NFT tickets at 1.1 Ethereum (or $3,300 at the time of the drop) with the most expensive one selling for 7.3 ETH, or $20,000, in the resale market, according to co-founder Jason Yanowitz. The company, however, only received 7.5% of that in royalties.
- Of the 20,500 attendees to CoinDesk’s Consensus, 20% participated in collecting and spending DESK this year, according to Sam Ewen, svp and head of CoinDesk Studios.
Exclusivity sells
Selling a VIP ticket for $3,300 requires a certain level of prestige and access that a general admission ticket (which is priced between $1,489 to $2,500) does not offer, but after those tickets sell out, there is very little that can be done to measure demand from the high-value super fans who are willing to spend at this level.
To change that, Blockworks turned its VIP ticket level into an NFT drop where owners of the NFTs gain access to the VIP exclusive events by showing it in their wallets. Not only could the company then see every time those tickets were resold or traded — and the price they sold for — but it also earned a 7.5% royalty from every resale transaction.
Blockworks created and sold 555 unique VIP NFTs called Permies, which were designed by a former Pixar animation artist to look like futuristic cartoon characters.
“If people didn’t like the idea of a VIP ticket, the price would have obviously fallen pretty substantially, or they wouldn’t have [sold] out,” said Jason Yanowitz, co-founder of Blockworks. Instead, the resale price for the most expensive NFT sold as a part of this drop, Permie #549, was 7.3 ETH (about $20,000 at the time) less than 48 hours after it was minted on April 7, according to OpenSea records.
Admittedly, only a small percentage of ticket sale revenue for Permissionless came from the royalties earned from secondary sales of the NFTs, Yanowitz said, but the initial earnings made from the NFTs would equal approximately $1.7 million based on the price of Ethereum at the time. In total, Permissionless earned over $10 million in revenue, he said, with a total of 7,000 people attending the three-day-long conference. Sponsorship revenues exceeded the company’s goals by 50% and ticket sales exceeded its goals by 25%, he added, but declined to say what the company’s goals were.
The NFT holders were also given the incentive to hold onto their Permies post-event, with additional perks and access offered to this newly-formed community, including a lifetime pass to future Permissionless conferences, free merchandise and a private Discord channel.
Despite the Permie drop leading to an important core membership for Blockworks, Yanowitz said that his team is still trying to figure out what its NFT business will look like and does not intend to launch another set of Permies in the future to keep the collection exclusive.
Testing the play-to-earn model
It might seem unnecessary to bribe event attendees to participate in a conference that they paid to attend, but for CoinDesk, encouraging people to sit in on panels and visit sponsor booths by awarding them its participation token DESK assisted the publisher and its advertisers in getting a better grasp on how over 20,500 people were spending their time over four days at the Austin, Texas-based event.
CoinDesk’s participation token does not have any monetary value backing it, meaning it cannot be spent outside of the confines of its closed economy, but for those who attended the Consensus conference, they had the opportunity to spend any earned DESK on food, drinks, merchandise, NFTs and even the chance to play Dallas Mavericks’ player Spencer Dinwiddie in a one-on-one basketball game or Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in a chess match.
Of the more than 20,000 people who attended, only about 20%, or 4,000 people, participated in collecting DESK during the event, which Ewen said was on target for the first in-person execution of the tokens, but was likely a lower number than what it would have been if the security measures his team put in place weren’t as strict and if blockchain technology wasn’t still so fragmented in its early stages of development.
One of the security measures that created a higher barrier to entry for attendees included issuing soulbound NFTs, or non-transferable tokens, that acts as an identifier and opens up their wallet to be able to collect DESK. “In some respects, we probably sacrificed more adoption for the security protocols, but that’s primarily just a reality of being cautious when building in public spaces where you have tens of thousands of people,” said Ewen.
Because of these challenges, the likelihood that someone would throw in the towel versus trying to get DESK to work in their wallet was higher than anticipated.
“We were hoping that people would actually be more digital savvy than they were because they’re coming to Consensus and it turns out there’s still a ton of people who don’t exactly understand” how to access their crypto wallet or scan the QR codes using the Coinbase app to claim tokens, Ewen said.
There were over 500 opportunities for attendees to earn anywhere from 15 to 150 DESK tokens, with the average number of transactions per 4,000 participants netting out to be about 15 throughout the conference. More than $20,000 worth of merchandise was purchased using DESK and more than 2,000 drinks were purchased using the tokens during evening parties, Ewen said. In total, DESK accounted for 40-45% of all the on-the-ground purchases made in its store and at the night time events, he added.
Sponsors are still on board
Audiences aren’t the only ones interested in the convergence of blockchain technology and the events industry.
One of the products that Decrypt Studios, the commercial production house under crypto news publisher Decrypt, offers its clients is custom events, and according to CRO and publisher Alanna Roazzi-Laforet, it’s a standard practice to issue NFTs or tokens as tickets to those events.
“You have to have an NFT to access specific parties or specific functions of Decrypt Studios and upcoming projects that we’re launching,” said Roazzi-Laforet. “That’s really becoming the norm.”
Despite the crypto bear market, events in the metaverse are still able to drive substantial revenue, particularly from Web3-curious advertisers, who are willing to pay top dollar to be seen in this space. One reason for this is that these events, as well as other NFT-based experiential activations, have the potential to collect first-party, privacy-compliant data from attendees who give access to their digital wallets to the brands and publishers hosting the events, according to Publicis Media’s head of innovation, Keith Soljacich.
Going consumer
This integration of NFTs and tickets isn’t limited to crypto conferences, however. Earlier this month, I was emailed by Ticketmaster that I had the opportunity to claim a free NFT with my ticket to The Weeknd’s After Hours Til Dawn Tour, which I could claim by setting up a digital wallet through cryptocurrency exchange platform Binance.
“There’s a future where all tickets are NFTs, and in some respects NFTs like that will eventually become super boring, and that will actually maybe be good for this space in a weird way. People won’t care as much about [the investment value of NFTs]. I think they’ll be more and more impressed by the access that it gives,” said David Cohn, senior director of the Alpha Group, the in-house tech and media incubator for Advance Local.
In ‘one of nature’s greatest events’ a party of over 150 ocean giants, signals hope for vulnerable species
In a “thrilling” Antarctic spectacle, for the first time since whaling was banned, dozens of southern fin whales were spotted feasting together. This has been hailed by scientists as a sign of hope for the world’s second-largest animal, second in length only to blue whales. The ocean giants possess a slender body that helps them glide through water at a really high speed. However, even this speed couldn’t help them evade whaling. In the 20th century, they were driven to near-extinction by hunters who systematically shattered populations of whales globally. Their numbers reached an alarming one to two per cent of the original population size. A whaling ban in the 1970s helped rescue the mysterious animal from the brink of nothingness.
Although researchers claim that southern fin whale populations have been slowly increasing following a 1976 whaling ban, there have been only been a few reports of these fascinating creatures in big groups at their traditional feeding areas.
Watch | Non-vegetarians, will you make changes to save Earth?
But scientists and filmmakers were able to record footage of up to 150 southern fin whales in Antarctica, in what Herr called “one of nature’s greatest events.”
Wildlife filmmakers from the BBC captured footage of the fin whales using a drone as they swooped and lunged through the water, launching huge bursts of air as they surfaced.
Also read | World is undergoing sixth mass extinction and things don’t look good for humans
According to Helena Herr, a researcher at the University of Hamburg and the study’s primary author, “one or two percent of their original population size.”
“We’re talking about a couple of thousand animals left for the whole southern hemisphere area.”
The scientists unofficially dubbed it the “fin whale party” as the massive animals feasted on swirling krill swarms.
Also read | Climate change threatens Emperor penguins; species faces extinction in 30 years
Fin whales were observed in around a hundred groups over two voyages in 2018 and 2019; these groups ranged in size from eight enormous congregations of up to 150 whales to small gatherings of just a few individuals.
Prior to now, feeding groups of whales were only ever observed with a maximum of twelve members.
The authors calculate that there may be close to 8,000 fin whales in the Antarctic region using information from their surveys. Fin whales are presently classified as “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and it is thought that there are 100,000 of them worldwide, with the majority living in the northern hemisphere.
(With inputs from agecies)
Jane Goodall returns to live events in effort to inspire hope, action on environment
“It was a grind,” she said, “because we created virtual Jane and virtual Jane could do Zooms and Zoom interviews and attend conferences every day.”
Goodall, 88, said she keeps telling her story both online and in person to try to inspire others to find their own way to deal with threats such as climate change and the loss of biodiversity.
“If we don’t have hope, then we become apathetic and do nothing. So, if we all become apathetic and do nothing, we’re doomed,” she said.
“We are at a critical juncture and it’s desperately important that people get together and actually take action.”
Climate change is altering the water cycle and has led to floods, droughts and wildfires. It has also driven biodiversity loss, with research suggesting that a million plant and animal species are at risk of extinction around the world.
Both have happened, Goodall said, because of a lack of respect for the natural world.
“We need to remember that we are part of the natural world and, in fact, we depend on it,” she said. “We depend on it for clean air, water, food, everything.”
Goodall said that means having a healthy ecosystem.
“I see an ecosystem as a beautiful tapestry and, within that tapestry, each species of plant and animal has a role to play,” she said. “As they become extinct from that ecosystem, it’s like pulling threads from the tapestry until it hangs in tatters and then the ecosystem will collapse.”
She said people need to learn to live with species such as wolves, which are an important part of the ecosystem, and people also need to do their part to help restore nature.
“I think we’ve somehow got to reach into people’s hearts,” she said.
“You’ve got to find stories to help them realize that this is a crisis, but I actually can do something.”
Some, she said, may feel as though they are just one person who picks up plastic trash each day and isn’t making much of a difference. “But, when you think that there are millions of people picking up bits of trash, you realize it is making a difference. Collectively, a big difference.”
Goodall said Roots and Shoots, a youth leadership program that’s part of the Jane Goodall Institute, helps young people figure out how they can help.
“If our young people lose hope, we’ve had it,” she said. “It’s not true that nothing can be done.
“We’ve got this window of time — I have no idea how big that window is, I know it’s still closing — and so Roots and Shoots is about giving young people hope by empowering them to take action, to choose themselves projects to make the world a better place.”
She said the program has members from kindergarten to university, and adult groups are also forming.
“This is my greatest hope for the future,” said Goodall.
“That, and our brain that is beginning to turn to finding ways to heal the harm we’ve inflicted and the resilience of nature — that places we have destroyed can once again support nature and animals on the brink of extinction have been rescued.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published on June 24, 2022.
Colette Derworiz, The Canadian Press
Event: Future Hope 50-50 Raffle Fundraising Event
Check out the Early Bird Prizes, June 3, 10, 17 and 24
June 30th – 50-50 Raffle Draw, win up to $50,000
Get your tickets now and support Future Hope to help men Stand Tall Again!
www.futurehope.ca/50-50raffle
Future Hope is a charitable non-profit organization committed to seeing individuals rebuild their lives in the transition from incarceration, release, and parole to being full members of society.
Events at Dover NH library, New Hope Baptist Church, Athenaeum – Seacoastonline.com
Events at Dover NH library, New Hope Baptist Church, Athenaeum Seacoastonline.com
Summer of Hope events aimed to reduce crime in summer months
BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) – Baton Rouge leaders are coming together for what they are calling the Summer of Hope.
It’s an 8-week initiative to reduce violence in the Capital City during the summer months.
- On Friday, June 10 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. you can join the Southern University Law Center Office of Innovation and Strategic Partnerships and Initiatives for their Expungement Initiative Session. It’s happening at the Southern University Law Center Atrium. Officials said they welcome questions about expungement. Attendees are required to bring the following: a background check from the Louisiana State Police; a certified copy of minutes; and a certified copy of the Bill of Information. For more information regarding this event, contact Marla Dickerson at mdickerson@sulc.edu.
- Friday, June 10, 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. you can join Mayor Pro Tempore Lamont Cole and Shoppers Value Foods for the 5th Annual Pedal for Peace. Bikers will ride to Howell Park, rest, and return to Shoppers Value at 5355 Government Street.
- Saturday, June 11, 9 am. -2 p.m. join Community Against Drugs and Violence (CADAV) for their inaugural Kids Fest at Scotlandville Parkway at Bradley Road and Veterans Drive. This event will celebrate, educate, and inspire youth in the community. From inflatables and health screenings to local talent and kickball this event offers something for the entire family. Looking to get an early start? Join the 1K walk and 2K run at 8:30 a.m. In light of this year’s theme, “Kids & Entrepreneurship” youth vendors ages 18 and under are encouraged to showcase their business by signing up by clicking here.
- Saturday, June 11, 12 p.m. – 3 p.m., join the Baton Rouge Community Street Team (BRCST) for their first Healing the Block event at the Leo S. Butler Community Center 950 E Washington St. Each Saturday, the BRCST is bringing hope, dinners, celebration, and community resources directly to streets, neighborhoods, and families that have experienced violence. Residents are encouraged to stay on the lookout because Healing the Block might come to their neighborhood
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Event: Future Hope 50-50 Fundraising Raffle
Check out the Early Bird Prizes, on June 3, 10, 17 and 24
Final 50-50 Draw June 30th via Facebook LIve @ 12 pm, you could win up to $50,000
$5.00 a ticket
Get your tickets now and support Future Hope to help men Stand Tall Again!
Manitoba residents only
www.futurehope.ca/50-50raffle
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