Moving Money Together - How Communities Can Reclaim Finance Beyond Platforms & Funding Dependency

What if financing didn’t come from outside but was built from within the community?

Based on real-world practice with cooperatives, this hands-on makerspace workshop invites participants to collectively explore, redesign & prototype peer-to-peer financing models for a cooperative economy.

Instead of pitching to investors or waiting for grants, participants will work with tools and concepts such as:

• pooled consumption and member contributions
• cooperative lending & mutual funds
• shared service providers as financial infrastructure
• community-owned platforms
• alternative money systems (from trust-based currencies to cooperative stablecoins)

The workshop combines systems thinking, collective mapping, and speculative prototyping. Participants will work in small groups on concrete use cases (e.g. a cooperative workspace, a cultural organization, a platform coop, a civic tech project) and develop financing models that are democratic, resilient, and value-driven.

Interactive 60-min workshop: map community money flows, identify gaps, co-create peer-to-peer finance models with democratic, trust-based design.