Cultivating A Future in Love: Meet Our Microgrant Recipients

7 unique projects; 7 dreamy visions of A Future in Love

Since launching our public briefs at LoveFest, we've been humbled by the incredible range of (over 80!!) proposals from around the world — each offering a unique vision for how we might build a future with love at its core. From mapping invisible acts of care to creating playful protocols for connection, these submissions showed us just how many ways there are to nurture more loving futures.

In fact, the sheer volume of brilliant proposals sent us into a bit of a love-induced panic spiral. ("Quick, check under the couch cushions for extra grant money!" may have been uttered more than once.) After emerging from our temporary frenzy, we took a deep breath and approached the selection process with careful consideration — balancing community votes with our commitment to funding a diverse portfolio of initiatives across geographies, scales, and approaches.

With all of that in mind, we're thrilled to announce seven projects receiving microgrants to help bring their visions to life.
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Grieving with Gladiatore ($2000)
In Chioggia's fishing community, the weight of unspoken losses runs deep. Despite technological advances, the sea remains unpredictable – bringing equipment damage, missed moments with loved ones, and deeper burdens that often stay buried beneath weathered expressions. This project transforms the Gladiatore – a fishing vessel wrecked in 2007 that stands like a wounded warrior at the port's entrance – into a gentle space for collective healing. Through a careful ritual that combines recorded boat sounds with anonymously shared burdens, fishers can release their personal griefs into the vessel's broken hull. The process prioritizes privacy and choice, letting each person decide what to share and when. The team will document their learnings in an open-source grieving workbook, helping other communities carrying their own unspoken struggles adapt this approach to their needs.

Maimee Rice Commons ($2000)
In Tsujido, Japan, rice farming faces a triple threat: aging farmers (average age 65), climate uncertainty, and economic pressures that make traditional cultivation "unprofitable." But what if profit isn't the only measure of value? For three years, this collective has been transforming abandoned rice paddies into spaces for community connection. Where modern farming technology made rice cultivation a solitary task, they're returning to village traditions – not just for nostalgia, but to build food security and social resilience. In 2024 alone, they rescued three paddies (3000 square meters) and distributed a metric ton of rice within their community. Now they're scaling up, developing both physical and digital infrastructure to make community rice farming more accessible. It's a powerful example of how "unprofitable" traditions might hold exactly the kind of value we need most: the power to bring people together.

Recipes as Currency ($2000)
Food is one of our most heartfelt expressions of love, deeply rooted in our territories and traditions. Yet younger generations are increasingly disconnected from local ingredients and the joy of cooking as shared experience. Starting in Milan, this project transforms recipes into a new kind of currency - one that trades in stories, heritage, and care. Through an open call with a local bakery, they'll gather recipes that hold special meaning to their keepers. The ten most compelling stories will be invited to a community breakfast, and their recipes will become beautifully designed cards available both physically and digitally. To access the digital collection, participants contribute their own meaningful recipe, creating an ever-growing circle of culinary connection. It's a simple but powerful system that shifts value from monetary to cultural, celebrating invisible acts of care while nurturing local food traditions.

Creative Kinship ($2000)
Research shows children with five caring adults in their lives are more resilient - especially when two are "nonparental adults" showing "genuine interest." But what does it mean to "be someone's two"? How do we create the modern village? Through co-developed frameworks and tools for creative kinship, this project helps aunties, uncles, god/odd folks and other collateral kin step meaningfully into young people's lives. Starting with Valentine's season workshops and culminating in a practical canvas/zine, it expands our vocabulary of care while creating new rituals for intergenerational connection.

International Care Economy 2050 ($2000)
A youth-led reimagining of economic systems through the lens of solidarity, Ubuntu and love. This project brings together young changemakers from BRICS+ countries to explore how diverse cultural traditions of care and community might transform our economic future. Through structured virtual workshops and creative futures exercises, participants will map existing care-driven practices across the Global South, prototype new economic models, and envision systemic impacts. The journey culminates in a collection of short stories and insights aimed at influencing multilateral spaces like the BRICS Summits while inspiring deeper collaboration around the globe. It's an ambitious effort to bring historically marginalized wisdom to the center of economic reimagining.

Moments of Connection ($1000)
As our internet grows increasingly algorithmic and AI-populated, genuine human connection feels rare. This thoughtful digital project surfaces authentic moments of vulnerability and care from Reddit - moments where someone opened themselves to strangers and was met with unexpected kindness. Delivered through a shared calendar that encourages slow, deliberate engagement, each daily entry celebrates how humans continue to find ways to support each other online. Using carefully designed LLM tools to help surface these moments while protecting privacy and wellbeing, the project reminds us that love can emerge anywhere - even in unexpected corners of the internet.

Charisma: A Compendium ($500)
A year ago "rizz" was Oxford's word of the year, but dating rates are still plummeting. Perhaps we’re in a rizz-cession. Enter Charisma: A Compendium, a book project bridging generational wisdom about connection from a bygone era. By collecting stories of pre-internet charisma from the 70s to early 2000s, it aims to inspire more authentic modern relationships while preserving cultural knowledge about human connection. The research process itself builds bridges by asking younger folks to gather stories from parents, aunties, neighbors and elders about finding love and connection before smartphones. Starting within the RADAR community for global reach, the project will culminate in both digital and print editions designed to spark conversation across generations.
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As a community-owned and funded organization, we don't often have the opportunity to provide direct financial support to the incredible initiatives our community surfaces. This made our selection process particularly measured — considering not just the strength of individual proposals, but how they work together to advance different aspects of A Future in Love.

At its core, the cycle was always about imagining what’s possible when we treat love as more than an ideal or emotion — as a public ethic, a shared responsibility, and the core of the systems and stories we create together. We're excited to support these experiments in expanding how we do just that. Follow along as these projects develop, and stay tuned for opportunities to get involved!

For those proposals we couldn't fund this round, we remain committed to supporting your visions in other ways. Our team is actively identifying alternative funding opportunities and making connections that could help bring these important ideas to life. (Like, for instance, a whole lot of you who pitched third-space style ideas — you’ll want to check out the Index Nodes Grant program, currently accepting proposals from around the world with a deadline of March 31!)

Thank you to everyone who submitted proposals — your visions for more loving futures inspire us to keep imagining and building and experimenting, even in the smallest of ways, with spreading the hope & agency we know it requires to make more of us in more corners of the world into the active citizens of the future who will shape better tomorrows to come.

Love,
RADAR