What Happens When Communities Control Their Own Money

Most communities run their money through someone else's platform. Venmo. GoFundMe. A fiscal sponsor. PayPal. Each intermediary takes a cut, imposes its own rules, and can shut you down without warning. Say your community raised $5,000 for emergency rent assistance. Genuinely good news, and the $5,000 is sitting in someone else's system under someone else's terms, and that someone decides when you can reach it.

The Hidden Costs of Financial Intermediaries

In 2023, GoFundMe processed over $30 billion in donations.^[1] Their fee: 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction.^[2] That means communities collectively paid nearly a billion dollars for the privilege of giving money to each other. And that's just the financial cost.

The real cost is control. In 2022, GoFundMe froze $10 million raised for the Canadian trucker convoy^[3]. Set aside what you think of that convoy; the precedent is the thing. A private company decided on its own that a community's money was not the community's to spend. Closer to the ground, mutual aid groups across the US keep losing PayPal accounts to "suspicious activity," which in practice means many small transfers between individuals, which is a precise description of mutual aid.

Fiscal sponsors stack another layer on top. The Open Collective Foundation did genuinely vital work for hundreds of mutual aid groups and open-source projects, right up until it announced its dissolution in 2024 and those groups had ninety days to find somewhere else to keep their money. Any arrangement that ties your financial infrastructure to one organization's balance sheet leaves you a bad quarter away from that phone call.

Community Currencies: A Different Model

Consider the alternative where the community holds the money itself, by design rather than as a workaround. A community currency is money issued and governed by its own members, which relocates every decision above. Members write the rules, members set the inflation rate, and members vote on spending.

This isn't a new idea. Ithaca Hours launched in 1991 in Ithaca, New York, and at its peak over 500 businesses and thousands of individuals accepted the local currency.^[4] One Hour was pegged at $10, roughly an hour's living wage at the time, and it spent at restaurants, with carpenters, at the farmers market, and on yoga classes. Because nobody outside Ithaca would take it, the money stayed in Ithaca.

BerkShares, launched in 2006 in the Berkshire region of Massachusetts, took it further. Participating banks sold BerkShares at a 5% discount, so $95 bought 100 BerkShares and the incentive to spend locally showed up the moment you made the exchange. Over 10 million BerkShares have circulated through the region, supporting hundreds of local businesses.^[5]

Time Banks: When Labor Is the Currency

Time banks strip the concept down to its essence: one hour of work equals one hour of credit, regardless of what the work is. An hour of legal advice equals an hour of lawn mowing equals an hour of tutoring. This radical equality challenges the market's valuation of labor and creates a system where everyone's contribution is inherently valued.

TimeBanks USA reports over 200 active time banks across the country. In Washington, DC, the Anacostia Time Bank has been operating for over a decade, connecting residents who exchange everything from home repairs to language lessons to eldercare. Members who might never interact across the city's stark economic divides find themselves in relationships of mutual support.

The Dane County TimeBank in Wisconsin has over 1,500 members who have exchanged more than 150,000 hours of service. Members report that the time bank does something money can't: it builds trust between neighbors. When you owe someone an hour and they owe someone else an hour, you're woven into a web of reciprocity that strengthens the entire community.

What Goes Wrong Without Democratic Control

Community money without community governance is just another form of extraction. We've seen this play out in crypto repeatedly. A token gets issued, a small group ends up controlling the treasury, and the people the project calls its community have no real say in how funds get spent. MakerDAO's multi-billion dollar treasury is governed by token holders, and the top 20 wallets hold enough votes to override every other holder combined.^[6] That's not community money. That's concentrated money with a community label.

Even well-intentioned community funds can go sideways without governance. In 2023, a mutual aid group in Portland, Oregon made headlines when a treasurer embezzled over $40,000 in community donations.^[7] There were no checks and no way for anyone else to look at the books; the arrangement rested entirely on trusting one person. The $40,000 was the smaller loss. The group also lost members and, harder to replace, the belief that this way of organizing works.

The Three Ingredients: Transparency, Rules, Democracy

For community money to work, you need three things working together. First, transparency: every member can see exactly where money comes from and where it goes. Real time, not an annual report, because a report tells you about a problem after the money is gone. Second, rules that the community itself sets: how much can be spent without a vote? Who can propose expenditures? What happens if someone misuses funds? Third, democratic governance: real decision-making power distributed among members, not concentrated in a treasurer or a board.

When these three ingredients come together, something powerful happens. Members contribute more because they can see their money working. They stay longer because they have real voice in decisions. And bad actors have nowhere to hide because every transaction is visible to the community.

How Goodkeep Brings This to Mutual Aid Groups

Goodkeep takes what worked in Ithaca Hours, BerkShares, time banks, and cooperative finance, and makes it available to any community group without the printing costs or the bank partnerships those experiments needed.

Every Goodkeep community has a transparent treasury where every member can see inflows and outflows. Spending rules are set by the community through democratic governance, not by a platform's terms of service. Members earn community income based on their commitment and contribution, creating the digital equivalent of a time bank that runs automatically.

No intermediary takes a cut. No platform can freeze your funds. No fiscal sponsor needs to survive for your community to keep operating. The money belongs to the community, governed by the community, for the community.

This isn't utopian. It's practical. It's what Ithaca Hours proved in the 1990s, what time banks prove every day, and what Goodkeep makes possible for any group of people who want to manage their shared resources on their own terms.