Tools for Growing the Commons

Tl;dr: How can commoners fund themselves, protect what they’ve built, cultivate active participation, and grow their impact without losing their human scale? This piece explores a diverse set of tools—economic and financial, legal and governance, social and cultural—that help communities build resilient systems designed to last and thrive.

Introduction

The 19^th century saw a major flowering of new institutional structures that formalised mutualist principles. Friendly societies, cooperatives, credit unions, and building societies became vital pillars of working-class life. Over time, however, many of these institutions were weakened by legal reforms, market pressures, and gradual disengagement by members. Today, many remain mutual in name only.

But also today, communities around the world are again building systems of mutual provisioning. And this time, they are supported by a growing ecosystem of practical tools that can help them avoid the fate of many of the organisations that came before them.

These tools span economics and finance, legal architecture and governance design, social frameworks and cultural resilience, technology, and more. Some have deep roots in indigenous and cooperative traditions. Others are newly emerging from advances in technology and science. Historically, many of these mechanisms were confined to specific cultures or privileged circles. But today, thanks to global communication networks and the open sharing of knowledge, they are increasingly accessible to anyone, anywhere.

One of the core goals of this Substack is to raise awareness of these tools, in the hope of making them more visible, shareable, and usable by communities around the globe. What follows is a modest attempt at introducing—what I personally consider—some of the most powerful tools from the kit: those that help creating lasting commons that flourish.

Note: rather than an exhaustive guide, this article provides a brief glimpse of what’s already available today. Future articles will explore these tools—and others—in greater detail, with examples and guidance on how to put them into practice.

Economic and Financial Tools for Autonomy and Local Value Retention

Many cooperatives and mutuals drifted from their original purpose because they became dependent on external capital. Over time, this made them vulnerable to pressures for growth, profit, and stronger managerial control—gradually eroding their core values and principles.

For commons to flourish, they need to cut dependency on the very institutions they seek to transcend. That means finding ways to fund infrastructure, circulate value, and invest in shared needs without turning to bank loans, private equity, or perpetual grant cycles. Fortunately, communities can repurpose proven tools from banking and finance to meet their own objectives.

Reclaiming the Credit Commons: Circulating Value Without Bank Money

Money is often called the lifeblood of the economy: without it, factories stand still, people sit idle, and goods gather dust in storage. Trade today is constrained by the availability of official currency, which tends to be scarce, costly to borrow, and prone to hoarding.

Most money now takes the form of bank credit, created whenever a bank issues a loan to individuals, businesses, or governments. This money is generated by ‘the stroke of a pen’—basically out of nothing—and must be repaid with interest, which compounds over time. This mechanism is the key engine behind the fierce competition and constant push for growth that defines the modern economy.

What’s often overlooked, however, is that credit originates with those who create real value: workers, businesses, and communities.

Credit—the ability to make a trusted promise of future payment—can thus be a commons. But for generations, it has been enclosed by private banks that have monetised our collective capacity to produce. As Thomas Greco, a leading expert on money and credit, puts it succinctly:

“[W]e give our collective credit to the banks, then beg them to lend some of it back to us—and we pay them interest for the privilege.”

But communities can build alternative credit and currency systems that are anchored in local value creation, enabling trade and exchange even in the absence of cash or bank money. By reclaiming the Credit Commons, the real producers of value can issue their owns means of exchange, thus reducing—or even eliminating—dependency on external money and the institutions that control it.

• • • Credit clearing enables groups of individuals or businesses to pool outstanding invoices, identify circular loops (e.g. A owes B, B owes C, and C owes A), and cancel out reciprocal obligations. In this way, communities can settle substantial volumes of trade without currency changing hands. This mechanism has been widely used by banks and financial institutions for centuries.
  • • Mutual credit systems enable members to extend interest-free credit lines to each other. This peer-issued credit can then circulate among participants as an internal currency, such that no external money is needed at all. Clear rules and limits ensure that tabs are regularly balanced, so that no member stays in debt or holds surpluses for too long. Business barter exchanges , Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS) , and time banks are all examples of mutual credit in action.
  • • Community currencies are local media of exchange that support trade among residents and community members. When well designed, they help keep purchasing power circulating locally, strengthen regional economic resilience, and promote shared values such as cooperation or sustainability.

Long-Term Investment Without Debt or Equity

Many commons projects need capital-intensive infrastructure—land, buildings, or equipment—that’s difficult to obtain without taking on debt (e.g. commercial loans) or giving up ownership (e.g. by selling shares). But these conventional financing options often create structural dependencies, channeling value away from the community towards distant lenders or shareholders—and increasing the risk that the common’s original purpose is diluted or compromised.

Fortunately, again, communities have other options:

• • • Use-credit obligations (UCOs) are pre-paid vouchers for future goods and services. A renewable energy cooperative might issue electricity credits to fund the development of a new energy plant. Similarly, a housing cooperative may issue rental credits redeemable for future tenancy, so that it can grow its property stock. These “future-use” vouchers are typically pre-sold at a discount to investors or community members. Because they are denominated in real-use terms (such as kilowatt-hours of clean electricity, or square meters of living space), they also serve as inflation-proof savings vehicles. In this way, UCOs can provide both a source of community-funded capital and a durable store of value, grounded in guaranteed access to essential services.
    • High street vouchers are a more short-term variant of UCOs, often used by small businesses to raise interest-free working capital or to monetise spare capacity. These vouchers promise near-future delivery of goods or services (such as meals, repairs, or products) and are typically sold to local residents, thereby strengthening ties with the community.
    • Rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) are ancient forms of peer-to-peer savings clubs. In these mutual aid groups, participants make regular contributions to a common fund that is distributed to one member at a time on a rotating basis. This allows participants to access lump sums of money without banks or interest. They exist under many names around the world and have been used for centuries to meet household and community needs.

While many of these practices have deep historical roots, what’s new is the availability of accessible technologies to support them. Open-source software tools, platforms, and protocols make it easier than ever to run community currencies, mutual credit systems, and digital wallets that seamlessly connect. With the right tools and collective intent, communities can thus start building parallel economic systems that reflect their values and serve their real needs.

Legal and Governance Tools for Protecting Shared Wealth

Economic autonomy is a starting point, but hardly enough on its own. Once shared wealth has been created, it must also protected from enclosure or capture. For a commons to endure, its purpose must be locked in permanently—ensuring that assets remain under community ownership and at the service of the core mission, even as people and circumstances change.

Licenses That Protect and Reciprocate

In the digital world, commons are often build around code, knowledge, or media. Theft of public intellectual property is one of the most pervasive appropriations of shared wealth. Fortunately, there are licensing regimes that help keep intellectual and digital resources open and accessible while also protecting them from commercial enclosure.

Copyleft licenses such as the Creative Commons Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA) and the General Public License (GPL) ensure that any modifications or derivatives must remain open and shareable. Copyfair licenses such as the Peer Production License (PPL) go a step further by requiring reciprocal contributions for commercial use: if you profit financially from a commons, you need to contribute back—either financially, or in-kind.

Legal Forms for Mutualisation and Asset Locks

Legal structures for mutualisation—such as Community Benefit Societies (BenComs) and Community Interest Companies (CIC) in the UK, or 501(c)(3) nonprofit organisations in the US —offer purpose-built frameworks for holding and managing assets in the collective interest. A defining feature of these forms is the asset lock: legal provisions that prevent the sale or privatisation of community assets, even if the organisation is wound up or its membership changes.

These structures allow communities to engage in a variety of activities while locking in social purpose. This ensures that operations faithfully reflect community values and that shared assets are preserved for collective benefit. For many community projects, especially those just starting out, these frameworks offer a relatively accessible and well-recognised pathway to secure long-term asset stewardship.

The Limits of Existing Legal Structures

However, while these legal forms provide a useful degree of protection, they come with important limitations.

In many cases, decision-making authority lies with a small group of trustees or board members, who are also personally liable for the organisation’s actions. While this may help prevent misuse, it can also lead to overly cautious and risk-averse governance. Often, trustees and board members are unpaid volunteers. Not only does this increase the risk of becoming overstretched and burned out, but it also limits participation to those wealthy enough to give their time freely.

Asset locks, too, are only as robust as the legal context in which they’re embedded. Laws can change over time, and even well-intentioned reforms may inadvertently weaken community protections. In some cases, legal loopholes or poor governance open the door to mission drift or asset transfers. Ultimately, no legal structure on its own can replace the need for strong governance, community monitoring, and clearly aligned incentives.

Nondominium: A New Approach to Ownership

Rather than invent new legal forms, some Commons thinkers advocate a different approach to ownership—based not on holding title to a thing, but on mutual agreements that define the rights and responsibilities of all involved.

Nondominium is a new “collective-property” concept in which a resource is owned by no one, but accessible to all who have agreed to the terms of its governance. As Chris Cook, who pioneered the idea, explains:

“Property is not an object—it’s a set of relationships.”

Nondominium is not a new legal form, but a flexible framework of consensual legal agreements—between people, organisations, and institutions—that redefines property as a negotiated, adaptive relationship around use, control, surplus sharing, and risk bearing.

There are four key roles, or “stakeholder classes”, in a nondominium:

• • • Users: those who benefit from the goods or services provided.
    • Providers: those who contribute capital, effort, or resources—whether as funders, investors, producers, or service providers.
    • Stewards: those responsible for day-to-day operations and maintaining service quality. They hold active decision-making powers, but not on behalf of investors alone—they are accountable to both Users and Providers equally. Importantly, they are paid professionals operating under production-sharing agreements that tie their income to service quality: they only share in the value that they help create—for stakeholders as a whole. This model aligns incentives and opens up participation to those from working-class backgrounds who cannot afford to contribute solely as volunteers.
    • Custodians: the guardians of the community’s mission and values. They have no operational role and hold only passive powers—most notably, a right of final veto to block decisions that would violate foundational aims or principles (such as asset sales, policy overhauls, or attempts at privatisation). They are disinterested arbiters whose only role is to uphold long-term purpose.

Crucially, under this arrangement, no single actor is in charge, and no single class holds dominant power. Stewards are empowered to act but made accountable to both Users (those who benefit from the service) and Providers (those who enable its existence). Custodians provide continuity and safeguards, even if operational leadership changes. Users and Providers have clearly defined rights and responsibilities.

If well designed, these agreements thus create the conditions for mutual interdependence: “If I want to gain, everyone else must gain, too”. All participants then benefit from the continued improvement of service quality, creating win-win-win outcomes for Users, Providers, and Stewards alike.

An additional strength of nondominium is its legal minimalism. It avoids dependency on organisational forms or statutory protections, instead using the most basic tools of private law—contracts and covenants—to lock in purpose and mission across existing parties. This makes the model portable across jurisdictions and more resilient to legal or regulatory change. By avoiding reliance on a single legal form, nondominium enables strong asset locks and long-term governance stability, but remains sufficiently flexible to adapt as participants and processes evolve.

Social and Cultural Tools for Active Commoning

Economic and legal tools can create the container, but without strong social engagement by its members, a commons remains an empty shell. The Commons is only alive if people actively shape, use, and govern it together.

Making Decisions Together

Commons governance begins with active participation. This requires tools and formats that empower people to speak, listen, deliberate, and decide together—without falling into gridlock or reverting to hierarchy.

Community assemblies and local forums are proven formats for open dialogue, idea-sharing, and agenda-setting. Complex issues can be dissected and viewed from different perspectives, which helps uncover trade-offs and overcome disagreements.

Not every decision needs to be made by every person, though.

Sociocracy is a powerful approach of consent-based governance that distributes decision-making across semi-autonomous working groups, or “circles”. Each circle makes decisions by consent, rather than majority vote: this ensures that every participant can live with the outcome, even if they don’t fully agree. Circles are connected to each other via feedback loops, which ensures transparency and accountability.

As a result, inclusiveness and effectiveness are balanced: circles can act relatively quickly while staying attuned to the broader community purpose. Members become more aligned, and resentments are less likely to build up. And decision-making remains a collective process, even when scaled up. This also allows for adaptable governance, where rules can be changed by those most affected by them—in a living practice of transparent co-creation.

Digital Tools for Collaboration and Shared Accountability

To support participation at scale, digital tools can play a key enabling role. In particular the Internet provides a unique “hosting infrastructure” for real-time social collaboration across geographical boundaries. For instance, there are platforms enabling communities to deliberate online (e.g. Assemblis ), collectively make and track decisions (e.g. Loomio ), raise funds (e.g. Open Collective ), or transparently allocate resources (e.g. CoBudget ).

Distributed ledger technologies (including blockchains and other shared ledgers) can further bolster trust and accountability. Though often associated with speculative cryptocurrencies, their real value for communities lies elsewhere: they allow members to record, track, and verify collective commitments in a transparent and tamper-proof way. Acting as a kind of shared memory of the community, these systems are particularly useful for documenting contributions, transactions, and decisions—without relying on centralised control.

These platforms significantly reduce the friction of participation. They also embody what philosopher Ivan Illich called convivial tools : technologies that people can shape and use freely, rather than being shaped or constrained by them (as is the case with industrial tools that are sadly prevalent today). In the context of the Commons, convivial tools enable collaboration without control or coercion, guiding individual creativity towards shared outcomes.

The Importance of Shared Identity and Cultural Narratives

Along governance and coordination lies a more elusive—yet equally essential—dimension: shared identity. The strength of a commons rests on the bonds of belonging, purpose, and culture that hold it together. Without a sense of shared identity, there can be no community cohesion—which is the bedrock of any functioning commons.

But how do communities form in the first place, especially in places fractured by class, race, religion, or ideology? And once they exist, how can they protect what they’ve built—from internal division as well as external interference? These questions are particularly pertinent in today’s pluralistic societies, marked by a wide diversity of views, backgrounds, and beliefs.

Some of our most persistent challenges today are rooted in identity-based divisions. These divisions can be deliberately weaponised, exploiting differences to create “us versus them” dynamics that fracture communities. But if cultural identities can be mobilised to divide, then they can also be used to unite. Finding ways to understand and connect with others who have very different perspectives is a crucial first step in creating alignment and forging shared values.

The Organisation for Identity and Cultural Development (OICD) has developed a comprehensive set of tools to help address this challenge. Their methodologies enable communities to understand how personal and group identities are formed, where core beliefs and values may diverge, and how common ground can be discovered. Using cultural mapping and analysis, these tools expose points of division or vulnerability, and help craft alternative narratives that foster inclusion and coherence. This makes it possible not just to describe community identity, but to actively shape it.

In the past, commons were often formed by relatively homogenous groups. Today, they must take root in far more complex and polarised environments. Building a shared cultural identity and narrative coherence, then, is not a luxury or afterthought, but a foundational design principle.

This new generation of social and cultural tools offers a direct response to one of the Commons’ greatest challenges: how to form communities that are strong enough to govern together, flexible enough to handle disagreement, and resilient enough to withstand external pressures and manipulation.

Finally, if the Commons is to achieve systemic impact, it needs to scale—but not by growing ever-larger and more centralised, as corporations or states typically do. Instead, the Commons scales by replication and connection.

Federation as a Commons Pattern

Federation is the primary strategy by which commons can scale without losing their core character. Federated Commons link individual projects together into larger, interconnected networks, often through shared protocols, standards or governance models. Each project remains grounded in its local context and community, preserving human-scale relationships and autonomy, while gaining the ability to coordinate, collaborate, and support others across the network.

One powerful framework for designing Federated Commons is the Viable Systems Model (VSM). It helps communities build organisational structures that are both resilient and adaptable. Based on the principle of subsidiarity, VSM supports the development of nested governance systems, where decisions are made as locally as possible, yet coordinated across wider layers. This allows commons to scale “glocally”: preserving local autonomy while embedded in a larger, mutually-reinforcing system.

Horizontal Federation

Federated Commons often begin with linking similar initiatives into cooperative networks. Housing co-ops may form regional syndicates, community-supported agriculture (CSA) initiatives may organise into producer networks, and local exchange networks can interconnect for mutual trade. Internet-based protocols offer new ways to coordinate directly across distance without relying on centralised intermediaries: examples include the Credit Commons Protocol for money and credit, Mastodon for federated social media, and the Inter-Blockchain Communication Protocol (IBC) for data and value exchange.

A related approach is cosmolocalism, the principle to design global but manufacture local. Paraphrasing Michel Bauwens:

“If it’s heavy (machinery), keep it local. If it’s light (knowledge), share it globally”.

Towards an Interoperable Commonsverse

Enabling interoperability across sectors is a further step. In some towns and regions, different types of commons—land, food, energy, transport, water—are beginning to interconnect. Residents may hold and use a mix of local currencies, energy credits, food vouchers, and rental credits—each managed by a different commons initiative, but usable within an integrated ecosystem. This emerging Commonsverse hints at a new, parallel system of provisioning where essential needs are met through cooperative, community-based projects that are both independent and interdependent.

Sharing Lessons for Replication

To support such scaling, communities need shared infrastructure for learning, documentation, and replication. This includes wikis, pattern libraries, open-source toolkits, and knowledge hubs that turn lived experience into templates others can adapt. By codifying lessons learned and making them widely accessible, we can reduce the friction of starting new commons and increase the chances they will thrive over time.

Rather than scaling up, commons are thus scaling out—by weaving a growing fabric of social relationships, mutual aid, and shared know-how across time and space.

Conclusion: A Flexible Toolkit for Enduring Commons

These tools don’t make a commons. But they can help make a commons last:

• Economic and financial tools support autonomy by keeping value circulating locally.
• Legal and governance tools safeguard shared wealth for generations.
• Social and cultural tools foster identity, trust, and active participation.
• Scaling tools grow collective impact without losing human scale or local sovereignty.

This isn’t a rigid blueprint, though. Consider it instead a flexible toolkit that is modular and adaptable to context. The key is appropriate scale: each community chooses what to use, when, and how, based on its needs, culture, and capacity. What matters is selecting the right tool at the right time, and staying open to adjust as the project evolves.

The true strength lies in the careful combination of these tools into multi-layered, living systems—creating the conditions not just for protection, but for long-term flourishing. As we’ll see in the next article, commons around the world are already doing this, assembling their own patterns shaped by place, people, and purpose.

Before You Go…

This Substack is written by and for people who want to reimagine the way we meet our needs—with practical, concrete actions that have real-world application. We are part of a growing alliance of individuals, communities, and organisations determined to seed and grow the Commons across different domains.

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Hi, I’m a researcher, educator, and consultant focused on alternative currency and credit systems that serve real communities.