1. What this template is

A group cannot build anything together until it has settled three things: how it is organized, how money gets in, and how it decides. Everything else people want, a house, a run of events, equipment, an app, is an add-on that sits on top of those three. So this is the general template, and Hearth and Experience Tribe are the specific ones that bolt onto it.

A project gets started through one of a few routes, and the route is chosen, not stumbled into. Which one a group picks changes what it has to raise, who holds what, and what people get back.

2. The one economic fact to be clear about

There is no economy inside the community. There is money coming in from outside, which the community turns into goods and access. That is the whole of it. Nothing here mints anything, scores anything, or promises a return.

The cleanest route for money coming in is a nonprofit, so what comes in is a donation. That is the best route, not the only one; other routes exist and each one changes the tax and legal picture, which is why the entity question goes to counsel before anyone raises a dollar.

Once it is in, it is spent building. Different projects need very different amounts, and the template says plainly which end of that range a group is at before it starts.

3. The ways people put in

People contribute in more than one way, and a group that only counts money will undercount most of what it has. The four:

• Money in. Pitched in, usually equally where everyone gets the same access out of it.
• A loan of something. Money or a thing, lent and expected back. A loan is repaid and nothing more, no share, no profit, no piece of what was built.
• Time. Hours worked on the thing, which is a contribution, not a favor.
• Use of something. A vehicle, a space, tools, a skill made available.

This is contribution economy, and its only honest form is a record. What went in, from whom, as what. The group agrees up front what each kind of contribution entitles someone to, and the answer is almost always access, not ownership.

4. How the money is held

A pool one person holds is not a pool. So the template's default is that the fund is held by the group's chosen entity, with more than one signer, and with what it may be spent on written down before there is anything in it.

The fund grows through levels rather than all at once. Each level unlocks a wider set of things it may be spent on, and a group knows which level it is at. The point is that nobody has to guess whether a spend is allowed, the level answers it.

Protecting it from being taken over is a design job, not a trust exercise. The things that do that work: more than one signer; spending limits per level; a published record of what went in and what went out; a fixed way to change the rules that is slower than a single meeting; and a rule that nobody who decides a spend is the person paid by it.

5. What to do with money left over

A group that makes more than it spends and has not decided in advance what happens to the difference will argue about it. So every project carries a backup plan for excess before it earns anything.

Experience Tribe is the obvious case: if a run of events clears well above what the events cost, that money has somewhere to go. The options a group picks from:

• Toward a Hearth, the next, bigger thing: a place.
• Toward community tools, equipment, a location, an app, whatever the list says is needed.
• Held at the next level, kept in the fund, which the level rules then govern.

Which option is theirs. Having one is not.

6. "What does this community need?"

A community that cannot say what it needs cannot spend well. So the template carries a standing, open list of what this community actually needs, and it is deliberately all-encompassing: equipment, a location, an app, kayaks, a van, a kitchen, somebody's time.

That list can run across several ETHOS rather than one. An ETHOS is a group operating on agreed values with its own way of deciding; several of them can want the same thing and fund it between them, and the list is where that becomes visible.

This connects back into Offers and Requests. The plan is that a community itself can post there, not only a person, what this community needs, read by people in the program who understand what that means. Money from the fund then goes to building it.

7. Where the savings come from

A group that only costs people money will not last, so the template includes the parts that give money back.

The main one is food. A community buys every two weeks or so from the suppliers grocery stores buy from, which is substantially cheaper than retail. Josh's estimate, not yet measured: a household saves roughly $100 to $200 a month on groceries, enough that for most people the membership has already paid for itself before anything else is counted.

The second one is shared use. Things nobody needs to own one of each.

8. The two add-ons, and what they cost to start

Experience Tribe needs very little money. The work is setting the event up and then selling tickets and recurring memberships. The money largely arrives as it is needed.

Hearth needs real money, pitched in close to equally, and what comes out of it is a place. Nobody really lives in it. It becomes the community center, and once a community has one, everything else has somewhere to happen: out-of-town speakers, healing events, gatherings of every kind, and, depending on what the venue allows, public events of the Experience Tribe sort.

9. What this template does not do

It does not choose a group's legal entity, and nothing in it is legal or tax advice. It does not promise anyone a return, a share, or a profit, because nothing here produces one. It does not value anybody's contribution for them. It does not hold the money. And it does not decide anything for a group, it gives a group the smallest set of decisions it has to make itself, in the order they have to be made.