Seems to me that the funds would be better spent if a larger portion of the Hive community had a say in which initiative gets funded and which doesn't, and provided feedback to each initiative individually. It becomes very difficult to evaluate the success of individual initiatives when they are lumped all into one. For substantial improvement to happen, it requires the people behind each initiative to directly interact with the community and make improvements in order to get sufficient community approval and become funded. This could create a very healthy competition and collaboration between initiatives. Now all of this potential for the community to up-level itself is lost, and not only lost but prevented because if someone has a good initiative and doesn't want to go through Value Plan (a centralized project with predefined project managers), they have extremely poor chances of being funded since the community is already super unhappy with all the funds spent by Value Plan on things they haven't agreed on. When there is artificial growth, self-growth gets stifled.

Maybe the Value Plan project managers can become coaches to people whose initiatives they think have potential? Coach them, share experiences and lessons learned, tools, etc., and all of this can help the individual initiative pass the DHF threshold. Does this seem like a viable way of doing it?