This morning, Citizinvestor - a crowdfunding platform for local government projects - launched a pilot program in the City of Philadelphia! We are thrilled to announce that Philly has become one of the first cities in the world to crowdfund city projects, and we're honored to say they are doing it on Citizinvestor.

This is truly something that has never been done before. For the first time in history, we are giving citizens the ability to tell government precisely where they want their money spent.

Starting today, Philadelphians can visit Citizinvestor.com to find and invest in the local projects they care about most, starting with TreePhilly, a campaign led by Philadelphia Parks & Recreation (PP&R) in partnership with Wells Fargo and Fairmount Park Conservancy that directly engages Philadelphia property owners, businesses and neighbors to plant and maintain trees. Through Citizinvestor, citizens can now micro-fund the planting of these trees across the city. Citizens’ credit cards will only be charged if the project reaches 100% of its funding goal. At that point, the trees will be disbursed to citizens to plant!

While Philadelphia is the first city to post projects to the site, today we are giving citizens in all U.S. cities the ability to petition their local governments to initiate the projects they care about most. Once a citizen-started petition reaches its target number of signatures, we will work with the citizen who started the petition to introduce the idea to the appropriate individuals in their local government and will work to try to get the petition turned into a project on Citizinvestor.

Mayor Nutter's office has been a fantastic partner on this project, as have been the dozens other cities we are currently working with to post projects to the site. We can't wait to launch projects in your city!

With today's launch, we begin the work of creating a community of micro-philanthropists across America. It's a monumental task, but one that we believe we are uniquely suited to succeed at. Thank you for taking this journey with us!