The brief.
Student-run organizations have a structural problem: everyone graduates. Institutional knowledge walks out the door every spring, partnerships lapse, and funding is perpetually one semester from crisis. BEN needed what most student networks never build — durable operations.
- Sustainable revenue that didn't depend on any single sponsor or person.
- Global growth without losing the culture that made local clubs work.
- Compliance — 501(c)(3) status, tax filings, and legal documentation handled properly, every year.
The approach.
- A 4-tier partnership & sponsorship model, co-developed to secure 15+ strategic partners — recurring, structured revenue instead of one-off sponsorships.
- A self-sustaining grant program, co-designed and managed at scale: 20–80 grants distributed monthly, driving education, developer adoption, and real-world integration.
- LATAM expansion — led entry into Chile, Argentina, and Colombia, overcoming market-entry barriers by building key relationships first.
- Operational transformation — SOPs, KPIs, and team alignment that reduced turnover from 90% to 5% and filled 90% of leadership roles.
- Finance & compliance — grant writing, financial documentation, tax filings, and legal management that sustained 501(c)(3) status across all six years.
- Culture & inclusion — anonymous reporting processes and a partnership with CryptoChicks, driving inclusion and accountability across all 84 clubs.
The results.
- Doubled the size of the global ecosystem — 84 clubs worldwide.
- 10× brand awareness in the Ethereum ecosystem.
- $180K in revenue from the 4-tier partnership model — 15+ strategic partners secured.
- $100K in grants secured through led grant-writing efforts.
- Turnover reduced from 90% to 5%, leadership roles 90% filled, efficiency improved 87%.
- Hundreds of developers enabled to launch through the monthly grant program.
The highlights worth telling.
Forbes noticed. BEN's youth work — including the Apprent.io hackathon — was featured in Forbes' "Generation Blockchain" coverage. Awareness compounding into legitimacy.
The grant program outlived its designers. The point of a self-sustaining system is that it keeps working after you leave. It did — distributing grants monthly and turning student curiosity into shipped projects, cohort after cohort.
Turnover was the real metric. Going from 90% to 5% turnover in a volunteer-driven organization is the difference between rebuilding every year and compounding for six.
The founder's words.
At the end of 2020, BEN's co-founder Jeremy Gardner returned to make a gift to the organization — and publicly named the people who had made it worth giving to:
"Big shoutout to @erickpinos, @yosoymelvera & @jinglanW and everyone else for keeping my vision alive (and improving it) while I expanded onwards as an entrepreneur and investor, enabling me to make this gift possible." — Jeremy Gardner, co-founder of the Blockchain Education Network, publicly on X, December 2020
Six years of stewardship, summed up by the person whose vision it was: kept alive, and improved.