Why Your Community Needs Governance Before Money Arrives

March 20, 2026 · 8 min read

In 2020, Austin Mutual Aid raised over $1 million in a matter of weeks.^[1] Volunteers were energized. Donations flooded in. The community was responding to a real crisis, and people showed up with incredible generosity.

Then the fights started. Who decides how the money gets spent? Who has authority over the bank account? How do you resolve disagreements when there's suddenly a million dollars on the table and no agreed-upon process for making decisions?

Austin Mutual Aid went through a painful governance crisis. They weren't alone. Across the country, mutual aid groups that had been running smoothly on volunteer energy and goodwill suddenly found themselves tearing apart the moment significant money entered the picture.

Money Changes Everything

Dean Spade, the mutual aid scholar and organizer, has written extensively about this pattern. When a group is small and broke, decisions happen naturally. Five people sitting around a kitchen table can reach consensus without Robert's Rules of Order. Trust is personal. Accountability is face-to-face.

But the moment money shows up — especially significant money — everything changes. Stakes get higher. Disagreements get sharper. People who never cared about process suddenly care very much about who controls the checkbook. And people who were doing the work feel betrayed when they realize they have no formal authority over the resources they helped generate.

Bed-Stuy Strong in Brooklyn raised $1.2 million in 2020.^[2]Much of that money flowed through one organizer's personal PayPal account. Not because anyone was trying to hoard power, but because that was the fastest way to start accepting donations. The governance question — who gets to decide what happens with this money — was deferred in the rush to respond to the crisis. And deferred governance always comes back to bite you.

The Pattern of Collapse

Here's how it usually plays out. A community group forms around a shared purpose. Early members are aligned and motivated. Someone sets up a way to receive money — a Venmo, a GoFundMe, a bank account. Funds accumulate. Then one of three things happens:

First scenario: the person holding the money makes a decision others disagree with. There's no process to resolve it. The group splits. This happened to dozens of mutual aid groups in 2020 and 2021.

Second scenario: the group grows, new members join, and original members feel like newcomers are trying to redirect funds away from the original mission. Without clear governance, there's no way to balance continuity with evolution. Food co-ops face this constantly — new members want different products, original members want to preserve the founding vision, and there's no formal mechanism to negotiate.

Third scenario: an external actor sees the money and tries to capture it. In the DAO world, this happened spectacularly when activists purchased governance tokens to raid the Aragon treasury. In the nonprofit world, it happens when board members redirect funds to connected consultants. In mutual aid, it happens when local politicians try to absorb grassroots groups into official city programs — with strings attached.

Governance First, Money Second

The groups that survive are the ones that establish governance structures before money becomes a source of conflict. The Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn has been running since 1973 with over 17,000 members. Every member works a shift. Decisions go through a general meeting. The governance came first, and the economics followed.

Mondragon, the massive federation of worker cooperatives in Spain, has operated for nearly 70 years. Their governance structure — one worker, one vote, with elected management councils — was established before the first factory opened. They didn't wait for a crisis to figure out how to make decisions.

The lesson is clear: governance isn't something you add later when problems arise. It's the foundation you build on from day one.

Two Tokens, Two Functions

This is exactly why Goodkeep separates community resources into two distinct layers. The first is a transferable token — your community's treasury. This is money. It can be sent, received, spent, donated. It's the economic lifeblood of the group.

The second is a committed governance token. You create this by locking up your transferable tokens — converting money into commitment. This token can't be bought or sold. It represents your stake in the community's future. And it's what gives you voting power.

This dual structure means governance exists from the very first moment of the community's life. Before any external money arrives, founding members can commit tokens and establish governance weight. When donations do come in, the decision-making process is already in place. There's no scramble to figure out who's in charge.

Whoever Cares Most Gets the Most Say

The beauty of commitment-based governance is that it naturally elevates the people who care the most. If you're willing to lock up your tokens — giving up their transferability in exchange for a voice in how the community runs — that's a credible signal that you're invested in the long term.

But commitment alone isn't enough. If governance power scaled linearly with commitment, you'd still get a handful of dedicated members running everything. That's why voting power follows a square root curve. Double your commitment, and your voting power increases by about 41% — not 100%. This means committed members have more voice, but they can never drown out everyone else.

For a mutual aid group, this solves the core tension: the organizers who show up every week deserve more say than someone who drops in occasionally. But they shouldn't be able to override the collective will of the broader membership. Governance before money. Commitment before control. That's how communities survive the arrival of resources without being destroyed by them.