Before announcing our Season One, we wanted to share our journey before web3, how we got here, and our learnings from a long and valuable Season Zero.

Our history

Let’s start at the beginning. Before becoming PactDAO, we were Pact Collective. Like many current grassroots efforts, Pact Collective started during the height of the pandemic. During this time, countless community groups formed or ramped up existing efforts to provide neighbor-to-neighbor relief. The only thing stopping these small groups from garnering large-scale support was their lack of visibility. These groups didn’t have marketing budgets, or well-designed/SEO indexed websites - many were just groups of friends and neighbors using Venmo handles and IG posts to get help where it was needed.

That’s why we made Pact Collective a project to provide visibility and financial/volunteer support to grassroots groups. We launched a donation subscription service where folks could have their donation given to a new community group each month. We self-funded the project and gave money to groups that were small in size, intersectional in their efforts, progressive in their values, and were run for/by the people they serve.

While we garnered much support, including some flattering press, we wanted to build a longer-lasting coalition with the organizations we were fundraising for. There was so much overlap in mission between the groups we were supporting, and we wanted to find a way to both bring these groups closer to each other and remove ourselves from the traditional ‘granter-grantee’ dynamic to share our resources and work collaboratively.

After spending months trying to figure out how to add signers to a US bank account and codify our cooperative principles, we started to lose steam. If at all possible, the task seemed daunting, time-consuming, and expensive. This was when we were made aware of different blockchain tools - particularly catching our interests were multi-signature wallets and smart contracts. Despite our initial criticisms of web3, further research taught us that these tools solved our problems in a fast/democratic way and could help construct a pathway to our ultimate goal: coalition building with grassroots organizations for revolutionary aims.

Towards the end of 2021, we wrote this vision into a Mirror crowdfund and launched our Season Zero with the hopes of garnering supporters, teammates, and co-conspirators. So, what happened in our Season Zero? And why did it last so long? Here we’ll answer all the how’s and why’s and what we’ve learned along the way.

What we did

We treated our Season Zero as an open playground to start, explore, experiment, and seek out others both in/out of web3 who shared our desire to create interdependent, resilient local communities. We did this by first building a community with our own neighbors and supporters.

We formed bonds by hosting weekly meetups that gave us the space to laugh, discuss, share, and get feedback on our ideas. These regular hangout events, mixed with the collaborative workshop series we started, our book club, group volunteering, activism, and other partner events, helped us find our footing and shape our vision. Wrapping up Season Zero, we’ve grown our member community to over 100, have a team of multi-disciplinary talented people, received some meaningful media interest, and are building a network of local community organizations and supporters to collaborate with.

We grew our community, like many entering web3, starting with Twitter. We found like-minded people, sought out their advice, and built partnerships with many of them. Some of our earliest friendships, like The Blockchain Socialist, have led to our inclusion in the Breadchain Cooperative, and with Austin Robey has led to our inclusion in Metalabel. These and many other conversations helped us learn, grow, and find our people in the space.

This was expanded through our participation in Kernel (another shoutout to Michelle Ma for advocating for our application). We joined Kernel’s KB5 cohort to develop our project and thoughtfully build our network of people in/entering this space. Kernel not only connected us to great people and fellow teammates but also to Gitcoin, where we’ve been lucky enough to receive funding support and friendship with many of its members.

While relationship building has been our most prized achievement, we’ve also accomplished a lot on paper. We’ve raised over $30K to date, became a registered 501c3, and with our Season One, will be sharing the first draft of our community bylaws towards a more democratically owned and controlled nonprofit organization.

What we’ve learned

Mutual aid is a framework for organizing - not a giving circle.

Back when we were fundraising for a different organization each month, we didn’t focus specifically on mutual aid. We supported groups with intersectional missions like ending food deserts or voter suppression in communities of color, helping queer people detained by ICE, and more. When making the transition into web3, we decided to focus specifically on mutual aid because of its anti-institutional nature and decentralized design. We continue to be inspired by mutual aid because it shows us that deliberate and democratic community-run systems of care are possible.

However, mutual aid takes many forms - and as we’ve seen several web3 projects do with terms like ‘public goods’, it can be abstracted to mean many things. Moving forward, we want to be clear that we support mutual aid that acts as a means to organize, because that is when it is truly revolutionary. Like the Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast Program, mutual aid was not just about giving/sharing resources but also providing the tools and education to give the neighbors they were serving a path to liberation. As Dean Spade (the author of Mutual Aid) said in our first collaborative workshop, mutual aid is about building relationships through organizing. More than the movement of resources - mutual aid, when done well, acts as the seed to building dual power by creating community-run institutions.

Web3 is not a mission.

In Season Zero, we were starry-eyed about web3 technology and its potential, and while we still are, we made the mistake of letting this excitement become a core part of our mission. In our team meetings, we’d brainstorm topics like “how can we get organizers to create multi-sigs for their organizations?” In our well-intentioned effort to educate organizations on these tools, we were coming across more like tech salespeople than comrades.

We needed to step back and remind ourselves that organizers know what’s best for them. All we can do is provide them with the information and spaces for dialogue. Ultimately, the decision is theirs to make - and because we are not Gnosis Safe or Metamask (web3 service providers), why should it matter to us? If we see value in these tools, we can show them by sharing that value in our combined efforts. We have to meet them in the struggle, support their work, and then offer our expertise when/if web3 tools come up organically as a solution.

Trust takes time. And consistency.

From our previous point, we see now more than ever that building a coalition with local organizers requires consistently showing up for their work. Thus we’re committing Season One almost entirely to local activism and education. Adopting technology or new financial systems will need careful contemplation within an organization and trust from its practitioners. If we are to be a part of that group, we must be dutiful soldiers in a shared movement rather than outsiders pitching new (especially highly technical) solutions.

Goals > Roadmaps.

We initially put our vision into the world with a pretty aggressive roadmap. Like (many of) our tech backgrounds taught us, we assumed a clear, ambitious, prescriptive approach would build confidence in our project and clarity in our objective. However, we’ve since come to understand that community work (when actually inclusive) is emergent. We realized the more people we brought to the table, the more our mission evolved and changed. And for the better. While this seems obvious, there are countless biases we’d held about work and how changing directions is perceived – as unstable rather than adaptive – that we had to unlearn. Fighting the internalized capitalism that demands we move fast, stay the course, and prioritize scale is a constant struggle but one that we’re overcoming.

We need new platforms.

Like many DAOs, we’ve been using Discord as our digital space for members to interact. We post all our events there, host open weekly team meetings, say “gm,” give shoutouts, and encourage feedback and ideas from members of the DAO. We even piloted mutual aid channels in the Discord where people can share what they can offer and what they need. However, Discord isn’t designed for most of these things. The thread functionality (or prominent lack thereof) has stifled dialogue and made it hard for meaningful conversation or mutual support to occur.

Today, most communications are fragmented across applications and platforms. Threads of conversation flow unconnected across an excess of mediums. These silos destroy the continuity of conversation and force us to rediscover new platforms, search for context within each conversation, and relinquish control of our data.

We will be looking into alternative models of communication to expand the accessibility and reach of our fight. Because in the end, platforms don't talk, people do.

In summary, what Season Zero taught us is that great collaboration starts with active listening. Listening to our neighbors, listening to ancestral/indigenous wisdom and people, and listening to the learnings of revolutionaries throughout history. What we see now is not that we aren’t ‘forging a new path ahead’ (bleh), or redefining anything really. We are standing on the shoulders of giants to try and do what people have tried to do for centuries - fight injustice through building resilient local communities. We just happen to have some new tools under our belt to try and do so.

For Season One, we’ll be following the tried and true playbook of helping build up our city through material and educational support. We’ll be taking our members out into the streets to show up for their fellow New Yorkers, have new conversations, and do the challenging work of collective healing. We hope to see you out there.

“Action on behalf of life transforms. Because the relationship between self and the world is reciprocal, it is not a question of first getting enlightened or saved and then acting. As we work to heal the earth, the earth heals us.”

― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

We are in a time of serious societal reckoning. We have felt the failure of systems viscerally. The fear of sickness and ecological turmoil, the helplessness of systemic injustice, and the alienation of social distancing and hyper-individualism, are all produced by capitalists.

A revolution is on the horizon - however, it might not be the one we’ve imagined. In their public protest, Bed Peace, Jon Lennon and Yoko Ono advocated strongly for a revolution of the mind. A process of slowing down, deprogramming the “monster” in ourselves, and using time and thoughtfulness to create something new. This is the undertaking of our community’s initial season.

We’re PactDAO - a mutual aid cooperative in NYC 👋. In the first step of our revolutionary experiment, we will start by simply bringing New Yorkers together. We see that the way out is through, and together, we can reprogram our minds and habits to build a foundation of familiarity, accountability, and companionship to actualize our collective potential. To plant seeds of change, we must grow in relationship with our community and each other.

A “New” York City.

Here in New York City, we live in multi-unit apartment buildings, yet each unit has its own WiFi, each of us has our own social circles, and set of worries and fears that we face in isolation. Every day, even in this massive ecosystem of millions, we are encouraged to operate as automatons. The “energy” that is so notably palpable in NYC, an energy brought by the people, is not seen by its citizens as something they are a part of, as much as an exciting backdrop. 

What if we tapped into this momentous power to collaborate regularly, like we did in the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings? What if we lived in a city of large-scale unity and support? Where, rather than millions of individuals operating in small sects, we create a beautiful ecology of sharing and interdependence? We see this future of our city as not only possible but probable in the face of failing, exploitative systems. We are ready to take this next step in imagining a new way of living. We hope you’ll join us.

It starts with us.

To build this relationship with the people and grassroots movements in NYC, we invite members to participate in events (both online and in-person) centered around mutuality, service, healing, and play. 

Mutuality

Trust and familiarity are the foundations to which we feel a sense of belonging. Rarely do we cross lines into new ways of thinking and new relationships without empathetic experience. We will shepherd an environment of thoughtfulness where our identity markers are acknowledged and treasured but do not make up the totality of our being. 

We’ll hold space for each other every week at an informal meetup as an invitation to simply come know and be known. For members and their friends, a diverse group of individuals, this is an opportunity to build bonds with people we might not have met otherwise but who share our commitment to a stronger collective and more humane living conditions for all. This easygoing gathering will be held on the same night every week to establish consistency and assurance, with varying locations and event types (bar hangs, potlucks, etc.) that will be decided upon in the member Discord (a free messaging app) channel weekly.

Service

"The greatness of a community is most accurately measured by the compassionate actions of its members." – Coretta Scott King

Alongside friendship, we must build a habit for public service and civic engagement. Walled in by capitalistic individualism, many of us forget what it’s like to participate in group healing. This means rolling up our sleeves to serve the people in our communities with what they need (and not the solutions we ascribe to them). 

In partnership with local grassroots organizations, mutual aid groups, artists, and organizers, who are also present in our Discord, we will be sharing opportunities for members to take an active role in the healing of our city. It is this kind of participation that will boost members' standing (via relationships and eventual tokens) in our ecosystem - because even though mutuality, healing, and play are all essential parts of the picture, they serve only as self-indulgence without the commitment and humility of service.

Healing

It is a principle that we cannot move towards the future until we understand the past. That’s why we’ll be looking not only into our personal and political pasts but learning from true stewards of collective living and liberation throughout history - like indigenous communities, mutual aid groups, and labor movements. 

In this season, we’ll also be working with local creators and healers to host intentional gatherings to unlearn the effects of oppressive systems and fully embrace our humanity. In a foundation of companionship, we believe that our collective can do the challenging work to decolonize our minds. Even with new tools, if we do not change, we will be fated to repeat the same insidious systems because we’ll still be carrying the damaging beliefs they imparted on us. A new world needs to be shaped by new beliefs. It starts with us. 

Play

One of our greatest joys, which is often suppressed in adulthood, is our ability to play. Between the severe compression of our daily tasks to the sole focus on monetizable hobbies, our lack of imagination is an intended systemic dulling of the senses. In taking back our time for silliness, exploration, and rest, we participate in a direct rebellion against the systems that try to convince us we are machines. They cannot have our humanity. 

Some of our events will be held for meditation, artful practices, and play, and we want to invite the entire city to participate in our collective joy. Hoping the COVID infection rate will have dropped dramatically by this time, we're planning a large-scale event for March which will  support local and diverse artists, creators, and businesses that make our community thrive. We’ll be looking for partner communities and DAOs to help achieve this effort by sharing resources and co-creating a memorable evening that has the potential to be the tipping point of a new era. Details to come. 

Be a part.

Pact’s community is for anyone who wants to see this vision for our city - not just New Yorkers in web3 and not just organizers and activists either. We welcome all walks of life who believe in collective power and want to see it actualized here in NYC. 

To join, you can contribute to our NFT fundraiser, give monthly in USD (starting at just $3/mo), or be a part of our working team. Members of PactDAO will receive event details via email and Discord.

We look forward to venturing out on this journey together.

Your partners in progress,
The Pact Collective 

edition://0x834Ebe76D6e0331fe86071963caD42c98199fC7c?editionId=51