In July 2014, Midtown Detroit Inc, a nonprofit planning and development group founded to revitalize the Cass Corridor neighborhood in the Motor City, wanted to renovate an overlooked kind of community connector: a rundown alley between Selden and Second streets could be a nice pathway and gathering spot between shops, making the city a more walkable place. The vision accompanied a plan to revive a series of derelict buildings that flanked the rutted, trash-can-lined artery. The city and other investors were rehabbing an apartment complex, cleaning up an adjacent park, and even planned to add a wine shop with outdoor seating that opened into the alleyway itself.

Before moving forward, though, the group faced the usual civic project hurdles: Did people in the area actually even want this? Would they actually use and care for it? And, equally important, was there any grant money available to offset the costs? To find out, MDI turned to Patronicity, a Detroit-based online fundraising platform that’s pioneering a new form of crowdfunding dubbed “crowdgranting.”

At Patronicity, which resembles a GoFundMe or Kickstarter for civic projects, the process works like this: A local nonprofit or community group posts a request for citizens to cover about half the cost of their project, a shorthand way to demonstrate both need and demand. If that happens, their state economic development agency, in this case, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC), will chip in to match. Such goal-based funding is assured from the second a project launches because of a separate deal that Patronicity has with each state in which it operates. (In this case, the underused space would become a “green alley,” complete with rain gardens, restored brick, and ample LED lighting.)

Patronicity works with each service group ahead of time to make sure the projects are structured in a way that will ensure state funding. “We thought: What if we can take the impact of Kickstarter had in the art community and transform it towards community development, making people champions of their own community?” says Patronicity president and co-founder Ebrahim Varachia. “Beyond that, there are other grant organizations already funding these types of projects. What if we marry the two?”

Read the full article about Patronicity by Ben Paynter at Fast Company.