Money for mutual resilience: Introducing Blacksky Cash

Blacksky didn’t begin with a pitch deck or a promise of disruption. It began with something much older and more enduring – a principle of mutual aid.

Mutual aid is how communities have survived for generations. Long before the term was coined by anarchist theorists, it existed as a practical ethic of care: neighbors sharing resources, redistributing risk, and enduring together under conditions of extraction. Today, many community organizers know it as a necessary response to capitalism’s failures. This principle has guided everything we’ve built here at Blacksky and will continue to build.

From Mutual Aid to Papertree

Before Blacksky was our first project, Papertree, which emerged from this ethos and from working alongside local community organizations. Its goal was simple: reimburse Bed-Stuy’s (a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York) residents for groceries. Anyone could contribute when they had capacity; anyone could draw from the pool when they needed support. No applications, no proof of hardship – just trust. This experiment showed us that when people are given tools rooted in dignity and autonomy, they organize care for themselves. That insight pushed us toward other deeply rooted traditions of collective finance.

Learning From Susus

In partnership with the nonprofit GatherFor, we rebuilt Papertree to support susus – rotating savings circles originating in West Africa and the Caribbean. In a susu, members pool funds and take turns receiving the larger pot, based on need or a collectively agreed rotation.

Susus aren’t just financial mechanisms; they’re social agreements built on trust and accountability. We designed the platform so GatherFor’s neighbor teams could manage these circles autonomously and democratically, without intermediaries controlling access to funds. Between both efforts, Papertree has been running for roughly 3 and a half years, helping facilitate over $250K in community funds to date – and still continues to be used by GatherFor and its engaged network of Neighbor Teams today.

Enter Blacksky Cash

Two years after launching Papertree, we’ve built Blacksky – a participatory community that began as a safe space for Black users on Bluesky, which has grown into a broader ecosystem for collective organization.

Blacksky Cash is the next step.

Every day, people support one another online through conversation, amplification, and care. At the same time, material need is increasingly visible. Requests for help circulate constantly. GoFundMes are everywhere. But money is scarce, trust is fragile, and digital solidarity often feels risky or transactional.

Blacksky Cash is our attempt to close that gap – to let communities that already support one another socially do so materially, without turning mutual aid into charity or reproducing extractive financial models.

This work raises three essential questions:

• How do we translate communal, often Indigenous traditions of money-sharing into a heavily regulated financial system?
  
• How do we make sharing money online feel meaningful rather than suspicious?
  
• How do we frame financial support not as charity, but as an investment in mutual survival?
  

Designing for Accessibility and Power

At launch, Blacksky Cash supports private, peer-to-peer payments, alongside collaborative group payments. This means individuals can send money directly and discreetly, while groups can pool funds together in ways that reflect how communities already organize. These group tools are intentionally designed to support closed, trust-based structures like susus – where members collectively contribute and take turns accessing shared funds – as well as small, grassroots organizations that need to raise money, make decisions together, and while gathering input from a broader network of supporters.

Designing this wasn’t straightforward. One of our core challenges was figuring out how to use the existing social connections on Blacksky to foster a genuine sense of community in Blacksky Cash without compromising privacy. Financial activity is deeply personal, and mutual aid only works when people feel safe. We focused on keeping payments private by default, while allowing groups to choose how visible or participatory they want their collective spaces to be.

Another major challenge was group fund management itself. From our own organizing experience and from conversations with community groups, we know that governance is rarely clean or static. Group dynamics shift. Membership changes. Needs evolve. Our earliest designs tried to encode every possible governance mechanism into the product, but we quickly realized that rigid structures don’t reflect how people actually work together. Instead, we scaled back. We chose to lead with governance that is simple, flexible, and grounded in trust – prioritizing dialogue and collective decision-making over overly prescriptive rules. The goal isn’t to automate solidarity, but to support it: to give groups enough structure to hold money together, while leaving room for the relationships and conversations that make mutual aid possible in the first place.

As far as costs, while we are still pre-launch, we can share that we are planning for no subscription fees for individuals or group accounts. We believe that communities should not have to pay to support themselves. The only costs that may surface at launch would be small withdrawal fees for fast or instant deposits, and optional custom setup fees for groups with highly technical needs that require custom builds. Ultimately our goal is to help build power, not extract it.

Limits, Risks, and What’s Next

At launch, Blacksky Cash will only be available only to U.S. residents transacting in USD, and in English (Spanish to follow), to meet banking requirements. We see this as a starting point, not a boundary. Over time, we plan to expand internationally, support more languages and currencies, and introduce tools like microlending and financial education.

We’re also clear-eyed about risk. Online scams and bots are increasingly sophisticated. While we will actively work to flag suspicious activity and prioritize real communities, users should remain cautious and avoid sharing personal information or engaging with unverified solicitations. Trust is collective work.

Measuring What Matters

Success for Blacksky Cash isn’t just about how much money moves through the platform. It’s about whether care circulates sustainably.

We look for:

• Ongoing participation in groups
  
• Repeat contributions (demonstrations of trust and support)
  
• Funds circulating within communities over time
  
• Collective decision-making around need
  

For us, these are signals of mutual resilience we’ll be using to define success.

Blacksky Cash isn’t a replacement for systemic change. It’s one tool, shaped by old traditions and lived experience, for helping communities survive right now.

Mutual aid has always been about more than money. But money, shared intentionally, can be a powerful expression of solidarity. This is us building toward that future.

We want to extend our sincerest gratitude for all of those who have been a part of this journey – first, our community members in Bed Stuy for participating in and promoting our initial effort, Teju and the Neighbor Teams at GatherFor for being incredible partners we continue to learn from, and the Center for Cultural Innovation – AmbitioUS for their generous support for this chapter ahead.