A few years ago, I was talking with Professor Craig Carter. I had worked for Prof. Carter as a teaching assistant for his mathematical methods and modeling class, 3.016, and stayed in touch with him throughout my PhD, chatting equally about research, world events, and whatever random lighthearted topics struck our fancy that day. On one such day, Professor Carter proposed to me a new idea: developing some sort of program at MIT where people could share a digital currency with each other as a sort of “thank-you” note for good deeds done. The catch? The currency wouldn’t have any value to the original holder: it only gained value once it was sent as a thank-you. The second catch? It didn’t have any monetary value to the recipient. Instead, the recipient would have the option to donate its monetary value to a charity of choice. It was a cool idea: the more good deeds someone did, the more likely it would be they would get thank-you MITcoins, as Professor Carter named this new digital currency. The more MITcoins someone accumulated, the more money would be donated to charity. MIT can be a stressful, isolating place. We hoped that if community members focused more on good deeds, it would bring a focus of positivity and togetherness with an overall benefit to student mental health.
Professor Carter offered the opportunity for me to help him work on the project, and I eagerly agreed. Over the next few years, we worked to develop a new website and app to organize sharing and storing MITcoins. With the help of MindHandHeart coordinating the effort, and three amazing UROPs: Isaac Redlon, Timmy Xiao, and Brian Ntanga, we finally launched the website MITcoin.mit.edu as well as the MITcoin app available on the Apple App Store and Google Play.
All members of the MIT community (students, faculty, and staff) are eligible to participate. When they sign up, they are given a wallet full of unspent MITcoins, and encouraged to send them to others as a small token of thanks for a kind act. At the end of the year, each participant will have the opportunity to designate a local charity for MIT to donate the value of all coins they earned through good deeds, enabling thousands of dollars of possible donations!
Through MITcoin, we hope to prompt community members to pause and reflect on the acts of kindness they and others in the MIT community do every day, which will raise morale and promote more acts of kindness in the future. The more good deeds MIT community members notice, the more they do, the more coins are put into circulation, and the more money is donated at the end of the year. Join the cycle of gratitude today by downloading our app today on Google Play or the Apple App Store! No apps? Sign up at MITcoin.mit.edu!
