How You Earn Your Share in a Community

In most community groups, there are two ways people contribute: time and money. The person who volunteers every Saturday and the person who writes a check are both helping — but in very different ways. Most tools treat these as the same thing, or ignore one entirely. Goodkeep treats both as valuable, and lets your community decide how to balance them.

Two Ways to Earn Credits

Both paths give you credits in your community. What you do with those credits is up to you: commit them for voting power, keep them liquid for spending, or a mix of both.

Your Community Sets the Rules

Here's what makes this different from a points system or a corporate reward program: your community votes on how credits are distributed. There's no formula imposed from above. Your group decides:

• How much is participation worth? Does showing up to a weekend cleanup earn the same as organizing it? Your community decides.
• Should we accept financial contributions? Some groups are fully non-financial — you earn your share by showing up. Others need funding and choose to sell credits for dollars. Both are valid.
• What's the balance? A mutual aid network might weight participation heavily so that the most active volunteers have the most voice. A co-op raising capital might weight financial contributions more. The ratio is a democratic choice, not a default.

How Money Comes In

When a community needs funding — for supplies, rent, a project — it can bring in dollars. Here's how:

1. The community proposes a fundraise. Someone proposes raising $500 for community garden supplies. Members vote on it.
2. Members (or outsiders) contribute dollars. The dollars go directly into the community treasury. In exchange, the contributor receives credits.
3. The community spends from the treasury. Treasury spending is proposed, voted on, and transparent to all members.

The key difference from platforms like GoFundMe: the community controls the entire process. No platform decides who can fundraise or takes a percentage. And the credits someone receives for a financial contribution work exactly like credits earned through participation — they can be committed for voice or kept liquid.

What About Day-to-Day Activity?

Beyond organized events and financial contributions, communities can recognize everyday participation:

Each community decides which activities earn credits and how much. A food co-op might reward shift work. A tenant union might reward attending city council meetings. A mutual aid network might reward anyone who helps distribute supplies. The system is flexible because communities are different.

Passive Earning: Community Based Income

On top of what you actively earn, committed members receive Community Based Income (CBI) — a regular distribution of new credits to everyone who has committed stake. The more you've committed, the more you receive, but with diminishing returns so no one member captures a disproportionate share.

Think of CBI as the community's way of saying: “thank you for being committed to us.” It rewards long-term members and helps new members who commit early build their share over time.

Why This Matters

Most community tools either ignore non-financial contributions entirely (Venmo only tracks money) or ignore financial ones (volunteer trackers don't handle funds). Goodkeep treats both as first-class — because real communities need both.

The person who shows up every week to sort donations and the person who contributes $200 for new shelving are both valuable. Your community gets to decide how valuable each is, and that decision is democratic, transparent, and can change over time as your community's needs evolve.