Vivero is a participatory and community-directed giving trust and concept application developed in collaboration with the Sustainable Futures Institute and Roots Cooperative.You can join the app and participate at https://vivero.appIn daily life, a Vivero is a tree or plant nursery where fragile seedlings and cuttings are propagated, protected, and nurtured until they are ready to be planted in their final habitat.In the former Earth Regenerators virtual community, Vivero served as a community-funded treasury, enabling participatory budgeting and community-led giving and grantmaking toward individuals, fellowships, projects, and social enterprises.Vivero was incubated between 2022 -2024 in the (former) Earth Regenerators virtual community as an interface for the Earth Regenerators Fund.In 2021, the Earth Regenerators Fund was formed to do fundraising, participatory budgeting, and allocate grants. It led us to understand what works, partner with a non-profit organization, Possible Planet (our former fiscal host), that resulted in the co-creation of Vivero – a new app to enable collective fund accounting and some social features to support and direct regenerative projects.As of April, 2024, Vivero was newly formed as a fiscal sponsorship of the Sustainable Futures Institute a U.S.A.-based 501(c)(3) registered non-profit in the State of Minnesota.Technical stewardship of Vivero is now maintained cooperatively by a U.S.A.-based benefit organization in the State of Colorado, Roots Co-op.Learn more about Vivero as a volunteer-led project at https://www.earthregenerators.org/viveroHow is it operating?As a legal structure and a fund, Vivero is a fiscal sponsorship of the Sustainable Futures Institute, a Minnesota registered 501(c)(3) organization focused on incorporating community and environmental criteria into the social decision-making process in a manner that facilitates the development of sustainable economies, communities, and environments.How is it constructed?Vivero was built in collaboration with Roots Co-op, a cooperative creative consultancy in Colorado. Similar to a DAO, but built with "Web2" technologies, Roots helped construct Vivero as a desktop and mobile app (built with Glide) to organize the community around focus areas, nominate potential beneficiaries, and keep track of accounting for the fund. Contributions to the shared treasury are facilitated by Stripe and OpenCollective and integrated into the application for transparency.How is Vivero a crypto endowment?What makes Vivero unique is its relationship to digital tokens (also called cryptocurrencies). By leveraging a community investment (staking) position as a ground layer for our grantmaking pool and community treasury, we are able to recreate the dynamics of an endowment fund, which typically relies on public market investments to grow capital. It is this dynamic that allows Vivero to be regenerative - growing within and alongside the crypto-economic systems through reciprocity and the creation of mutual benefits.By offering a fiat onboarding via Stripe, and directing contributions (in part) to a crypto-backed treasury, we are able to expand web3 benefits to an audience that may have otherwise never heard of crypto, opening the door to curiosity.As a crypto-native treasury, Vivero grows through the collection, re-stake, and eventual gift of tokens. Currently, we are using the $REGEN token, on the Cosmos network, and of course $GIV.Learn more about Vivero from the Earth Regenerators at https://earthregenerators.org/vivero/