The Penny a Day Challenge is a one year savings scheme.
There is not much to it. Starting on day 1, you save 1p, on day 2, you save 2p, day 3, you save 3p and so on until you reach day 365 and you save $3.65. By the end of the year, you will have saved £667.95.Source
This can be in any currency - pounds, dollars, euros, steem and any of its many derivatives (jahm, spi, leo and so on). There's a handy 1-page chart to help you record your savings and the 1 Year Penny Challenge post by 
Just as a savings scheme, this is a brilliant idea, but it also occurred to me that it is a perfect project to bring new people to STEEM. And SteemCampUK, taking place in April, could be one of the places where we launch it.
I have three target groups in mind:
- people involved in the 28 charities I work with in London.
- people involved in Community Managed Libraries in the county of Leicestershire and
- the Credit Union movement.
Charities, generally, especially small and local charities, are governed by a spend approach to budgets. There is no incentive to save or to invest, because any money that isn't spent on the service the charity has received a grant to provide has to be paid back to the funder.
Up and down the land at this time of year, trustees of charities will be meeting to look at their management accounts and identify any potential underspends that will need to be used by the end of the financial year on 31 March.
This is very problematic because it is very hard for any charity to improve their financial position and stabilise their organisation and the much-needed services they provide.
It also means that there isn't a culture of saving and investing and nor is this likely to develop because of the disincentives.
The Penny a Day Challenge is a very effective learning tool to start to change this. The challenge is very simple and accessible, there is a nice reward at the end of it and it is easy to accommodate within existing budgets.
Along the way, participants will see for themselves the results and benefits of compounding. If this simple challenge is then supported and co-ordinated through the blockchain, it then provides a very simple project where people will also learn about STEEM, crypto and the blockchain.
How Am I Going To Do This?
This year I will focus on individuals, although they will all be associated with charities and non-profit organisations.
The charity sector in the UK is the most highly developed in the world: it is also subject to very high surveillance and regulation. Crypto and blockchain generally don't have a good press and the markets are very volatile.
These factors, combined, present new and unknown risks to charities, which anyway, tend to be risk averse, so this early stage learning and capacity-building will be for individuals only.
For Leicester and Leicestershire based people, I'm going to use SteemCampUK to launch the Penny a Day Challenge. Over the past year I have been building on my network, refreshing old contacts and making new ones.
There are two community bases and a Credit Union in Leicester that I will be working with over the next couple of months. One of these is the Saffron Lane Resource Centre and another is the Highfields Community Centre.
Out in the county, Leicestershire, there are 32 Community Managed Libraries. These are small libraries in the smaller towns and villages, previously run by the County Council, but now transferred into community management and run by volunteers. These are charged with raising their own finances.
For London, I will run a session towards the end of March for interested people with a view to starting the Challenge at the beginning of the new financial year on 1 April.
What Do I Want to Achieve?
Well, it would be great if, at the end of the year, we had retained a hundred new users to STEEM, wouldn't it? That would a be a nice outcome. Especially if they all brought a few people with them through the year.
There's three elements to it, I think:
- saving, investing, the value of compounding.
- getting over the barriers of using STEEM.
- a way to get comfortable about blogging.
If everyone achieved the Penny a Day Challenge, that would be a grand total of £66,795 of your English pounds saved. Of course, if they chose to save STEEM, at today's price of about 9p per STEEM, that would be about 725,000 STEEM. And if it were SPIs, we would be getting close to issuing the total fund of 1 million tokens.
More than that, we would be building the capacity to understand and use the blockchain: for charities, for responding to social problems, for challenging and holding authority to account and have a practical model to bring new users to STEEM. This would be invaluable.