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.

Money changes this, and a lot of money changes it fast. Disagreements sharpen because there's now something to disagree over. People who found process tedious develop urgent opinions about who holds the checkbook. Meanwhile the people who did the actual work discover they have no formal say over resources they generated, which lands as a betrayal even though nobody betrayed them.

Bed-Stuy Strong in Brooklyn raised $1.2 million in 2020.^[2]Much of that money flowed through one organizer's personal PayPal account. Nobody was hoarding power; a personal PayPal was simply the fastest way to start taking donations during a crisis. The question of who decides what happens to the money got postponed, which felt correct at the time and always costs more later, because by the time you return to it there is a balance sheet and there are factions.

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 Venmo or a GoFundMe so donations have somewhere to land, and funds accumulate. From there it usually goes one of three ways.

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. With no governance in place, there's no way to weigh continuity against change, so the argument becomes about who is more loyal. Food co-ops live this: newer members want different products on the shelf, founding members want the founding vision protected, and nothing exists to negotiate between them except attrition.

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 a city office offers to absorb a grassroots group into an official program, funding included, conditions 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 enormous federation of worker cooperatives in Spain, has run for nearly 70 years on a structure of one worker, one vote, with elected management councils. That structure was written before the first factory opened its doors. Nobody was under pressure, nothing was at stake yet, and that is precisely why it held up when things later were.

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 why Goodkeep splits community resources into two layers. The first is a transferable token, which is your treasury and behaves exactly like money: send it, receive it, spend it, donate it.

The second is a committed governance token, which you create by locking transferable tokens up. That conversion runs one way and the result has no market: it can't be bought or sold by anyone. What it represents is your stake in the community's future, and it's the only thing that carries a vote.

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

Commitment-based governance sorts people without anyone having to judge them. Locking your tokens up means giving up the ability to move them, and paying that price to get a say is a signal nobody can fake. Talk is free. This isn't.

Commitment alone would still concentrate power, though. If voting weight scaled linearly with it, a handful of very dedicated members would end up running everything, which is the failure mode the whole design is trying to avoid. So voting power follows a square root curve instead. Doubling your commitment raises your voting power by about 41%, not 100%. Committed members carry more weight and never enough to drown the room out.

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.