Support that shows up all year.

The way it works now

Most community organizations fund an entire year out of a handful of weeks. The spring gala. The year-end appeal. Whatever the grant cycle decides. Programming, hiring, and planning all ride on how those weeks go, and everybody involved knows it.

It isn’t that nobody wants to give steadily. It’s that giving steadily is hard to set up and harder to maintain. A recurring program means stitching together an email tool, a payment link, a spreadsheet, and someone’s evenings. The work lands on the person with the least time.

Why membership

Membership is older than the software built for it, older than the sector’s vocabulary for it. People have always paid to belong to the library, the co-op, the union hall, the trail club. It works because it asks for a small, repeatable commitment and gives something back for it: standing, access, a say, a sense of being part of the thing rather than a source of funds for it.

That exchange is what most modern giving tools quietly dropped. A recurring gift became an auto-charge with a receipt attached. We think the exchange is the whole point, and that restoring it is a design problem someone should actually work on.

What we're building

Legwork starts with membership: tiers and payments, renewals that take care of themselves, a record of every member and where they stand, and a direct way to reach the people who joined. Plumbing, not a platform for asking.

And on the other side, something organizations can't build alone: one account for members across every organization they belong to. It means a shorter path to joining, and connections that hold because managing them is easy.

Where this goes

In the future, every community organization—no matter its size or resources—thrives on strong, lasting relationships with the people who support it. And every person who supports those organizations—with money, time, voice, or presence—has one place where all of their commitments come together, compound, and turn into real community impact.

If it works, the organizations that hold neighborhoods together stop planning around the next big campaign. A land trust knows what next spring looks like. A community station can hire. A theater company can commission the risky play, because the base is steady enough to absorb it.

That's the version of this we're working toward: lasting relationships under community work, with recurring membership as the reliable base layer, and software that treats them with the seriousness they deserve.