Human Alliance for People and Planetary Infrastructure
The financial infrastructure the world depends on has been captured by extractive capital. It blocks the work needed to support life.
But there's an alternative. The financial institutions built for communities already exist — 88,000 community-owned financial institutions serving 400 million people in 118 countries.
HAPPI exists to put them at the heart of economies that work for people, planet and life.
A world with community finance at its core is
a world with community at its heart.
The economy that extracts from communities depletes people and the planet. It is extracting from the present and future of life itself. The predicaments we face are interconnected. They are consequences of the same constrictive choices, made repeatedly. Symptoms of extractive systems in overdrive: built to concentrate, not circulate.
While credit unions, cooperatives, and community lenders were built on democratic, community-minded principles, they operate inside a driving economic model and infrastructure designed for extraction. Extractive technology vendors, capital markets and financial rails were engineered for concentration and control. The infrastructure, tools and conditions that foster flourishing do not exist.
The evidence is clear — from Mondragon's seven decades of cooperative economics, to Italy's Emilia Romagna, where cooperatives lift up the entire region, peer-reviewed health improvements in Preston, ten years of community wealth building in Toronto, and Scotland becoming the first nation to mandate it by law. The gap is shared infrastructure. Communities untethered from extractive systems will do the rest.
Individual institutions face fragile conditions. Interconnected institutions that support mutual needs form a system. Robust systems that allow healthy connectivity and flow can regenerate. Entities working in isolation cannot. HAPPI exists not just to connect and enable, but to co-evolve in ways that support life, work and diverse local communities: more members, deeper roots, stronger institutions and healthier communities.
The shared coordination layer that connects member-owned financial institutions — credit unions, cooperatives, CDFIs, and mutuals — with the tools, capital mechanisms, and participative governance they need to work synergistically as a system. With shared covenants, no single institution controls it.
Not a charity. Not a campaign. Infrastructure — the kind that can adapt to needs. Making community-based cooperatives a first choice, attracting members committed to strengthening local economies. Offering an obvious alternative that supports life. Not ideological ones proposing grand designs that don't live.
Despite limitations, cooperative economies have already demonstrated what works — deposits circulate, institutions strengthen, communities benefit. What they've never had is the shared infrastructure to work at system scale. Previous attempts failed through fragmented governance, first-mover risk, vendor capture and rigid models that fail to adapt to changing conditions and needs. HAPPI is being designed to eliminate those constraints and allow potential to flow.
HAPPI is a foundation. All infrastructure is held in perpetuity — for humanity, not for any shareholder, state, or institution. Originating in Australia. From day one, evolving to allow the full global spectrum of finance that can flow, serving community-based membership and local sovereignty.
"When capital flows into community-owned institutions and organisations, it doesn't just get deployed. It circulates. That cycle has never had the infrastructure to work at system scale. But it can."
Scotland, February 2026: The world's first statutory Community Wealth Building mandate — creating legal obligation for the cooperative economic model, not just aspiration.
Preston, UK — The Lancet Public Health (2023): Community wealth building produced a 3% decline in antidepressant prescribing and 11% increase in median wages relative to expected trends. Peer-reviewed. Controlled.
Many community-based institutions are disappearing. In 2024 alone, the number of credit unions globally fell 10% — the steepest decline in years. More than 900 US institutions have been lost since 2019. Industry analysts predict 3,000 to 5,000 will disappear by 2028. At the moment humanity most needs what they do, they are consolidating out of existence.
The cooperative economy is not a Western idea. In Kenya, 14,000 savings and credit cooperatives serve 14 million members. In the Philippines, 20,000 cooperatives serve 12 million. In Brazil, SICOOB connects millions to community finance. They are innovating — in isolation, without the shared infrastructure to function synergistically.
Founding charter
Never to be sold.
Never to be used to extract from humanity.
Never to serve any one organisation
more than all of them.
HAPPI is established as a foundation. All infrastructure is held in perpetuity — for humanity, not for any shareholder, state, or institution.
HAPPI is not 'the' solution. There is no one solution to the entangled life-diminishing crises we face. But extractive systems maintain them.
HAPPI exists to allow life-affirming alternatives. To connect communities into a system that supports real needs and work for life — that will never be realised in a world dominated and controlled by extractive capital.
HAPPI exists to allow the human capacity and spirit of people to flow — through the workers, care-givers, creatives, dreamers, and doers. The millions of people all around the world who will build a better future when supported by communities, community capital, and regenerative interests that enable and attract, rather than hold them back. And to provide the support they need to resist extractive forces.
The cooperative sector already holds trillions in assets.
What it has never had is the coordination layer that can unlock capital for collective good — meeting local community needs while attending to reciprocal flows that benefit the wider community-rooted system.
Adaptive infrastructure can evolve to acquire businesses, community assets, and essential services on behalf of the communities that need them most.
Select the role that best describes you and the form will appear below. We will reach out with updates and opportunities relevant to where you stand.
We will be in touch — not with noise, but with a conversation relevant to you. This is the beginning.
If you're a member of a credit union, cooperative, or community lender — and you believe they should have a larger role in your local economy — nominate them here.
HAPPI will reach out to institutions that have been nominated by their own members. Your voice is what opens the door.
We need a minimum of 3 nominations for the same institution before we make contact. Share this with fellow members — like communities, nominations are stronger together.
Share with other members to reach the 3-nomination threshold faster.
Thank you. We've noted your nomination. Share this page with other members of your institution — once three of you have nominated them, we'll make contact.