I've been sitting on something...
There's a project I read about a while back called the Consistent Money Moving Project and haven't stopped thinking about it.
It's mutual aid as a steady weekly habit. A group of people in DC pool money and send it to households who need it. Same amount. Same day. No strings.
And you two are the people I want to think about it with.
What it is
Back in 2020, a guy named Owen was helping a neighbor cover bills and wondered if a small group sending small amounts on a steady rhythm could steady someone's life.
Five years later it's grown to around 400 people who pool about $5,600 a week, and each of 25 Black households gets $205 or $225 every Monday. It runs on Venmo, CashApp, and a spreadsheet.
The shape
There are two rhythms in it: the season and the week.
A season is one 13-week cycle of the aid, timed to a real one: fall, winter, spring, summer. Long enough that recipients can count on it, short enough that no one's overcommitted. Four a year, and they roll straight into the next with no gap.
Inside each week:
Then the next week it happens again.
The people
Why you two
Arts, apps, and ops shop is totally your lane.
CMMP is arts (the design of how care looks), apps (a small ops backbone moving real money on a real schedule), and ops (the unglamorous spreadsheet work of keeping it consistent).
You'd care about the small human things in it, too. Like how someone getting money sometimes writes back in the Cash App note, because when your phone's about to be cut off, a payment memo is the only message that still sends.
I'm not asking you to start anything, but I would like to think about a mutual aid project with you.
Coffee, a walk, whatever's easy.
