Governance for Mutual Aid Groups: How to Make Decisions Without Drama

Every mutual aid group starts on vibes. Everyone is aligned, decisions make themselves, and writing down a governance structure feels not just unnecessary but slightly against the spirit of the thing.

Then something arrives to test it. Usually money. Sometimes it's just growth past fifteen people, or one decision somebody made that half the group would have made differently. Whatever it is, the day it lands, the absence of governance stops feeling like freedom and starts feeling like nobody knows who is allowed to say yes.

This guide covers decision-making structures that hold up at scale without importing corporate bylaws or Robert's Rules. The goal is a framework that lets a group decide things fairly and quickly without spending its social capital on the process.

In groups without formal governance, decisions default to whoever shows up. Whoever is at Tuesday's meeting decides how Saturday's funds get distributed. Nobody voted for that arrangement, and it quietly filters out the members working evening shifts, the ones with kids to put to bed, and the ones who follow along fine in writing but not in a fast English conversation. The exclusion is structural rather than deliberate, which is exactly what makes it hard to notice from inside the meeting.

The Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC) explicitly warns about this pattern in their legal toolkit for community organizations: without explicit governance structures, groups fall into “unwritten rules, friendship cliques, and popularity contests.” The people who talk the most, show up the most, or have the most social capital end up making decisions for everyone.

This is the opposite of mutual aid. It replicates the power dynamics that mutual aid is supposed to challenge.

Most groups think they have two options: consensus or majority vote. Both have serious problems for mutual aid.

Consensus

In theory, consensus means everyone agrees before action is taken. In practice, it means:

• One person can block everything. A single “no” stops the group. This gives disproportionate power to the most stubborn voice in the room.
• Decisions take forever. Getting 20 people to fully agree on anything requires marathon meetings that exhaust everyone.
• Fatigue gets mistaken for agreement. By hour two, people stop objecting because they want to go home. What gets recorded as consensus is really a stamina contest.
• It doesn't scale. Consensus can work with 5-8 people. At 30 members, it collapses.

Simple majority voting

Majority vote is efficient, but it creates its own problems:

• 51% can override 49%. In a mutual aid group, narrow margins mean nearly half the community feels unheard.
• Voters don't always show up. If only 12 of 30 members vote, 7 people can make a decision for the whole group.
• It rewards organized factions. A small, coordinated bloc can dominate every vote.

The 2025 CHI paper “It Actually Doesn't Feel Very Mutual” studied how technology shapes governance in mutual aid groups. Their findings are striking:

• Existing tools centralize power in the hands of whoever controls the platform (the Slack admin, the Google Drive owner, the Venmo account holder).
• Groups that rely on synchronous decision-making (live meetings, real-time chat) systematically exclude members with less flexible schedules.
• Without persistent records of decisions, institutional memory lives inside particular people and walks out the door with them.
• Technology designed for corporate teams or casual social use actively erodes mutual aid values when repurposed for community governance.

The paper's core argument: mutual aid groups need tools designed for their specific governance needs, not adaptations of corporate project management software.

Most mutual aid groups manage governance through a patchwork of tools that weren't designed for it:

Signal polls

Quick, familiar, and ephemeral, which is the problem. Polls scroll away up the chat history, so nothing accumulates into a record. There's no quorum requirement and no way to see who never saw the poll at all. Six weeks later somebody asks who authorized the $2,000 disbursement and the honest answer is that it's in the thread somewhere.

Loomio

Loomio is probably the best existing tool for cooperative decision-making. It supports proposals, discussions, multiple voting methods, and persistent records. The problem: it costs $25/month for a group plan. For mutual aid groups operating on thin margins, a $300/year governance tool is a hard sell in a meeting where the same $300 is one member's rent gap.

Google Forms and Docs

Free but scattered. Votes happen in Google Forms, discussions happen in Signal, financial records live in Google Sheets, and meeting notes are in Google Docs. Nothing connects to anything else. The person who set up the Google account has admin access to everything. If they leave, institutional access goes with them.

Drawing on what worked across hundreds of groups, here's a framework that keeps decisions fair without making them slow.

1. Write it down

Your governance structure should live in a document every member can open. Length is not the point. One page covering decision types, voting methods, and what happens in a dispute already puts you ahead of most groups. The SELC toolkit has free templates if a blank page is the obstacle.

At minimum, document: who can propose spending, how votes are conducted, what threshold is required to pass, how long votes stay open, and what happens when there's a dispute.

2. Make voting transparent and asynchronous

Not everyone can make Tuesday at 7pm. Post proposals and leave them open for a defined window instead; 48 to 72 hours suits most groups. That single change decouples having a say from having a flexible schedule, which is the largest source of quiet exclusion in most groups.

Votes should be recorded permanently. Every member should be able to see the full history: what was proposed, who voted how, what passed, what didn't.

3. Diminishing returns on power

In most governance systems, the more you participate, the more power you accumulate. This creates a core-periphery dynamic where a small group of highly active members effectively runs everything.

Design instead for diminishing returns on power. Showing up should always earn you more voice, just less and less of it as you accumulate more, so that the tenth hour of participation doesn't buy what the first hour did. You still want the most active members engaged. You don't want their engagement compounding into control.

4. Square root voting, explained simply

One promising approach is quadratic (square root) voting. Here's how it works in plain language:

Rather than one person one vote, members get a budget of voice credits to spend across everything the group decides. Caring more about an issue lets you spend more on it, and the price climbs fast. One vote costs 1 credit. Two votes cost 4. Three votes cost 9. The cost is the square of the votes, which is where the name comes from.

Watch what that does to a member with 16 credits. They can go all-in and cast four votes on one proposal, or spread out and cast one vote on sixteen. Nobody has to police anyone's intensity, because the budget does it. Strong preferences get expressed; they just get expressed at the cost of sitting out other decisions.

This is running in the wild, not only in papers. Several cooperatives and DAOs use versions of it. A group that doesn't want the full mechanism can approximate it: give every member ten points a month to spread across proposals however they like, and most of the benefit survives.

5. Tiered decision-making

Not every decision needs the same process. A useful framework:

• Small decisions (under $100): Any two members can approve. Log it, move on.
• Medium decisions ($100-$1,000): Proposal posted for 48 hours, simple majority of active members.
• Large decisions (over $1,000 or policy changes): Full proposal with discussion period, supermajority (2/3) required, 72-hour voting window.

Pick thresholds that fit your group's size and budget; the numbers above are a starting point, not a standard. What carries over is the principle. Match the weight of the process to the weight of the decision, so that buying printer paper doesn't require the same ceremony as changing the bylaws.

It's easy to read governance as bureaucracy arriving to spoil something. Try reading it as care work instead: the unglamorous labor of making sure the quietest member still gets counted and the group outlives the people who started it.

Groups that invest in this early are the ones still operating in three years. Nobody does it because writing rules is enjoyable. They do it because the alternative is unwritten norms and informal hierarchy, and the cost of that lands hardest on the members who most need the group to still be there next month.

Browse the Goodkeep directory to find mutual aid groups near you and learn how they structure their decision-making.