How You Earn Your Share in a Community

People contribute to a group in two currencies: time and money. The member who volunteers every Saturday and the member who writes a check are both keeping the thing alive, in ways that aren't interchangeable. Most tools either flatten the two into one number or track one and ignore the other. Goodkeep counts both and leaves the exchange rate to your community.

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? Plenty of groups stay fully non-financial, where the only way to earn a share is to show up. Others need cash and sell credits for dollars. Neither answer is the correct one.
• 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 actual dollars, for supplies or rent or a specific project, it can raise them. The mechanics:

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.

What separates this from GoFundMe is that the community runs the whole process. Nobody external approves your fundraiser or skims a percentage off it. Credits received for a financial contribution behave exactly like credits earned by showing up: commit them for voice, or leave them 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 holding committed stake. More commitment means more income, on the same diminishing curve that governs voting, so nobody ends up collecting a disproportionate share of it.

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

Community tools tend to pick a side. Venmo tracks money and knows nothing about who showed up; volunteer trackers log hours and can't touch a treasury. Groups end up running both and reconciling by hand, which is how the two halves of a community's effort drift apart in the first place.

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.