Money distribution in Karrot
The Karrot project receives money through funding and donations. We want to redistribute this money to people that already are or want to get involved.
We work within a culture of intrinsic motivation, so we aim for money not being the main motivator for contributing to Karrot as a project. However, we recognize that people need to make a living and have different degrees of privileges and needs, so we would like to support them to spend less time doing work they don’t enjoy. Karrot’s support to contributors will happen within the project’s financial capacities.
Karrot’s income is collected by our fiscal host All for Climate and visible on the Open Collective platform: Karrot - Open Collective. We think about this money as a common pot, which means that we want to decouple how Karrot receives the money, and who we distribute it to.
All money agreements are made together in a “money circle”. We discuss and decide the amounts each contributor gets together. Everyone who joins the weekly meetings, uses Karrot, and additionally everyone who wishes to contribute or to receive money for contributing to the project is invited to the “money circle”. The “money circle” needs to be announced beforehand. For practical reasons it usually takes place in the weekly meeting.
The following serves as a guideline for decision making:
3 categories of contribution
- committed contributor → receives money monthly on a “basic income” level
- occasional contributor → flexible time and amount
- volunteer contributor → don’t wish to receive money for whatever reason
Questions that might be explored during “money circle” discussions
- “what we need” → needs based, food, housing, travel
- “what we do” → time based, how much we put in in terms of hours or responsibility
- “what we offer” → output based, how much value we are sharing
- “what surrounds us” → country we live in, privileges we hold, wealth we have access to
the above was written during Karrot’s community casual calls of April and May 2022 by Bruno, Nathalie, Vasilis and Nick
we made minor changes and re-agreed this proposed on 4th November 2022 - Vasilis, Bruno, Nathalie, and Nick
‘money distribution proposal and agreement’ will be reviewed in 6 months from now on Friday, May 5th, 2023
*reviewed on 2024-07-16 meeting