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. Your community raised $5,000 for emergency rent assistance? That's great — but it sits in someone else's system, subject to someone else's terms of service, and someone else decides when and how you can access 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] — regardless of where you stand on that issue, the precedent matters: a private company unilaterally decided that a community's money wasn't theirs to spend. Closer to home, mutual aid groups across the US have had PayPal accounts frozen for "suspicious activity" — which often just means a lot of small transactions between individuals, exactly what mutual aid looks like.

Fiscal sponsors add another layer. Organizations like the Open Collective Foundation (OCF) provided a vital service to hundreds of mutual aid groups and open-source projects — until OCF announced its dissolution in 2024, leaving groups scrambling to find new fiscal homes for their funds. When your financial infrastructure depends on a single organization's survival, you're always one bad quarter away from crisis.

Community Currencies: A Different Model

What if the community itself controlled the money? Not as a workaround or a hack, but as a fundamental design choice. Community currencies — money issued and governed by the community itself — flip the entire model. Members decide the rules. Members set inflation rates. Members govern spending democratically.

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 Ithaca Hour was worth $10 — roughly an hour's living wage — and could be spent at restaurants, with carpenters, at the farmers market, or to pay for yoga classes. The currency kept money circulating locally instead of flowing to distant corporate headquarters.

BerkShares, launched in 2006 in the Berkshire region of Massachusetts, took it further. You could buy BerkShares at participating banks at a 5% discount — 95 US dollars bought 100 BerkShares — creating an immediate incentive to spend locally. 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 controls the treasury, and the "community" has no real say in how funds are spent. MakerDAO's multi-billion dollar treasury is governed by token holders — but the top 20 wallets control enough votes to override everyone else.^[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, no transparency tools, no democratic oversight — just trust in a single individual. The group didn't just lose money. They lost members, momentum, and faith in the model itself.

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. Not after the fact, not in an annual report — in real time. 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 the best lessons from Ithaca Hours, BerkShares, time banks, and cooperative finance — and makes them accessible to any community group, digitally and for free.

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.