Applicant Name: Heenal Rajani

Applicant ETH Address: heenal.eth

Organization(s) or Affiliation(s): SuperBenefit DAO, Institute for Community Sustainability, Reimagine Co, Greenpill London, All In For Sport DAO

Why do you want to serve as an Expert Evaluator for the Localism Fund?

Ethereum localism isn't a side interest for me - it's my life's work finding its ultimate expression. I want to serve as an Expert for Localism Fund because this network represents what I've been building toward: a collective of peers who understands that genuine place-based coordination requires both deep community roots and sophisticated coordination infrastructure.

For 25 years I have been actively developing communities - working in government, the public sector, nonprofits, social enterprises and various civil society and informal networks. What makes my positioning fairly unusual in the web3 space is that I'm a localist, activist, community builder and social entrepreneur grounded in community practice before protocol. I came to tech through organizing, not organizing through tech, with web3 as my toolkit, not my identity.

My wife and I own and operate Reimagine Co - a community hub, event space, and Canada's first zero-waste, plant-based meal service. As founder of the Institute for Community Sustainability, a Canadian non-profit based in London, Ontario, and co-founder of SuperBenefit DAO, I've spent five years exploring Ethereum's potential for community coordination while simultaneously building grassroots infrastructure through repair cafés, solidarity networks, and local resource-sharing systems. Over the past two years, these parallel tracks have converged - I'm now beginning to use web3 tools in the real-world community spaces I've helped create.

I can help Localism Fund identify projects that are actually strengthening local autonomy versus those just using the language. I know the difference between what sounds good in a Discord and what works in a community hall. As a localism expert, I can review applications and spot the difference between web3 fluency and real implementation. I can help to determine whether applicants have what it actually takes to make this work, whether they've grappled with the real challenges of onboarding normies to web3: how to make wallets meaningful to people who don't use crypto, how to bridge traditional nonprofit governance with on-chain coordination, how to secure institutional funding while experimenting with web3 mechanisms, how to build systems that strengthen place rather than extract from it. I've done the unglamorous work of actual implementation in a place where nobody cares about the latest protocol - they just want to fix their toaster or borrow a drill.

I came to Ethereum carrying two decades of questions about how to resource community resilience, distribute power equitably, and create transparent systems that serve place-based flourishing rather than extraction add the centralization of power and resources. Over the past five years I've been relentlessly pursuing the practical intersection of web3 infrastructure and real-world community impact, exploring bringing Ethereum-based coordination tools into contexts where they can genuinely shift power and resource flows.

Working with AI coding tools has allowed me to adapt and build tools to run novel experiments and to better serve the communities I work with. This month I forked Allo IRL, improved its UI and UX, and deployed it at a live community event.

My work centers on bridging grassroots wisdom with technical innovation, translating between community organizers and protocol designers, and insisting that Ethereum localism must be grounded in actual local knowledge, relationships, and context.