About Us
The VELA DAO is run by VELA Education Fund grant recipients. VELA is a non-profit organization that is catalyzing a vibrant alternative education ecosystem by providing trust-based funding, fostering community-building and knowledge-sharing, and increasing visibility for education entrepreneurs, awarding over $24M to more than 2,000 entrepreneurs across the United States.
“The future of philanthropy is co-led between funders & grant recipients,” shared Thanasi Dilos, Co-Founder of Gotham Labs and Civics Unplugged. “VELA DAO is not just about grantmaking. It represents a bigger vision to incentivize collaboration between individual VELA grant recipients by creating a value network within the DAO, powered by Web3 technology. The DAO will create a roadmap to exponentially increase the impact of any philanthropic portfolio by supercharging knowledge exchange within grant recipient communities.”
The founding members of the VELA DAO are all VELA grant recipients who have successfully launched education ventures and learning environments. They are:
Karema Akilah, founder of The Genius School and The Genii DAO
Thanasi Dilos, co-founder of Gotham Labs and Civics Unplugged
Kyle Gamba, founder of La Luz
Jeffrey Imrich and Sung-Ae Yang, co-founders of Rock by Rock
Alycia Comer-Wright, founder of Cultural Roots Homeschool Cooperative
The VELA DAO provides a unique opportunity for VELA grant recipients to explore and leverage emerging technologies, like AI and Web3, to improve their work and strengthen their communities. While the VELA DAO will begin with grantmaking work, plans are underway to further incentivize collaboration and the sharing of resources by releasing a token, available only to DAO members, that can be redeemed for grant capital or other rewards.
Join Us in Community, Governance & Grantmaking
Our mission
VELA’s approach to catalyzing innovation begins with our distributed community of entrepreneurs grounded in shared values. We see the VELA DAO as a platform that distributes ownership of VELA’s resources, gives grantees decision-making and operational power, and incentivizes grantees to support each other – expanding VELA’s impact and, ultimately, better serving the education ecosystem.
We are striving towards a world where funders and community members work collaboratively to identify new projects, more effectively allocate capital, and more transparently assess the growth and impact of projects in the ecosystem. We believe a DAO is one way to distribute ownership and employ web3 tools to challenge the status quo of how philanthropy operates.
The VELA DAO aims to create a platform that adds value to the existing VELA community and ultimately expands the VELA community and its impact, using web3 tools. It will start with a grantmaking opportunity, and there will also be a token community to reward community members who support each other. In a world with fast-paced technology change, including AI and web3, the VELA DAO will also teach members how to use these technologies inside and outside of the DAO.