Rotterdam is one of the 15 winning cities of the 2021-2022 Global Mayors Challenge, a global competition organized by Bloomberg Philanthropies that awards $1 million to the boldest and most ambitious innovations submitted by cities around the world.
As part of the design team of the project, UpSocial worked closely with the city of Rotterdam to select Rikx as the idea with the most potential among others that the city was exploring. After supporting Rotterdam to win the first round of the competition and be among the 50 finalist cities, UpSocial guided the design thinking and development of the final idea, and then wrote the winning proposal.
Rikx is a new and transformative solution: a local marketplace for social outcomes, generating sustainable private investment for local unemployment projects with reliable results. Through Rikx, private sector partners can purchase tokens that monetize the social impact generated by social entrepreneurs, similar to the carbon market.
UpSocial continues to support the development of Rikx by leading an international pilot in three European cities: Antwerp, Dublin and Warsaw. The pilot will test the replication potential of Rikx and expand the scope of the model to address a range of social challenges, in addition to unemployment.
