There's a place you love, and a mess wounding it. Put a prize on it. Someone clears it. The proof gets verified, and the place is left proud.
Both live now. Or scroll to see how it works.
Nearly everyone loves some specific piece of the world. Trash is a wound on something loved, and the will to fix it already exists in abundance.
Give to an institution and your hundred dollars goes everywhere except your park. The care loses the place it was for.
File a 311 ticket and it joins a backlog the city can't clear. The care turns into a number in a line.
Only people with the time, the body, and a free Saturday get to act. Everyone else's care just sits there.
Turn the care people already feel into the place made proud.
PlaceProud connects the people who love a place to the people who'll do the work, so a corner gets better even when the people who love it are busy, elsewhere, or past their embankment-climbing years.
Money is how care travels between strangers.
Photo, pin, prize, and one line about what you want made right. The poster goes live, and your money waits behind it.
An exclusive lock, so nobody argues over who got there first. Then the work, with before-and-after photos captured right at the spot.
It grades the proof against the original. Real cleanup, prize paid, place left proud. A hard call goes to a human, fast.
A prize stays exactly where your care lives: this path, this tree line, this corner. Not a general fund, this spot.
Hunters win prizes for verified outcomes. No employer, no shifts, no pizza-party thank-yous. They don't volunteer, and they're not adorable about it. They're proud of the place they leave behind.
The prize is posted before any payout, so "it was already clean" never pays. Captured in-app, GPS-bound, fresh photos only. Honesty is built to be the easy path.
No grant cycle, no committee, no city blessing needed to put a prize on a mess in a place you love. The commons, kept by a market small enough to see.
Funders speak care and place. Hunters speak the work and the win. The same poster holds both at once: an act of caring that's also an honest way to get paid.
Loves a place and pays to keep it whole. Puts prizes on specific messes, in corners they actually walk.
Claims the prize, does the work, collects. Every finished job is a notch on a record they own: proof, earnings, history.
Finds the work and takes the first photo. Spotters never hunt their own finds, so the proof always comes from someone who isn't paid for the cleanup.
Keeps a place proud over time, not just once. A standing prize on a corner, a block, or a whole park. The trash comes back; so does the prize.
Turns a single photo into a clear, checkable job at posting, grades the before-and-after at turn-in, and sends anything uncertain to a human. The Referee's call is what releases the prize.
The prize board is what you see. The Referee is what makes it trustworthy, and it's the part that lasts.
The prize board is the storefront. The Referee is the infrastructure.
If the Referee can't picture what "done" looks like, it doesn't post the prize. No fuzzy jobs, no fuzzy verdicts. Safety isn't a policy binder here, it's the shape of what can be posted at all.
Gloves and bags. No tools, so no injury to worry over.
Shared ground only. No private land, no trespass.
Eighteen and up. Simple, and it stays that way.
The path side of the curb. Never the traffic lane.
Bank and path, never the waterline.
Prizes target trash and surfaces, never people, homes, belongings, or memorials.
Each rule quietly removes a whole category of trouble, checked the moment a prize is posted, before a dollar attaches. That's the legal department: a short list, enforced by the design.
Prize No. 001 goes live this summer.
PlaceProud launches in New Haven, Connecticut, seeded on the trails and corners people already love. The first prize goes up on a real mess, and the whole bet is whether a stranger claims it. That's a test you can't fake.