What people ask us.

HAPPI — the Human Alliance for People and Planetary Infrastructure — is a not-for-profit foundation that holds shared financial infrastructure in common, on behalf of the world’s community-owned financial institutions: credit unions, cooperatives, mutuals, and CDFIs. It is the coordination layer beneath those institutions, not a replacement for them.

The infrastructure itself is built by Maslow; HAPPI is the foundation that holds the result under binding covenants, so the network can never be captured or sold out from under the institutions that depend on it.

Maslow builds the infrastructure; HAPPI holds it. Maslow is the steward-owned company doing the technical build. HAPPI is the not-for-profit foundation that holds the result in common for the institutions, under the covenants.

The two are deliberately separate. The builder cannot quietly become the owner — that separation is itself part of what keeps the infrastructure uncapturable. More on how HAPPI is held →

HAPPI is for the community- and member-owned financial institutions that join, and for the network they create together. Each institution keeps its own licence, board, and community relationships — HAPPI holds the shared layer beneath them, not a replacement for them. The beneficiaries are the institutions and their members, never an outside shareholder.

HAPPI holds three things in common for the institutions: a coordination layer that lets separate institutions act together; the shared rails they run on — payments, lending, savings, credit, liquidity, shared risk, built once and used by all; and the governance covenants that keep the whole thing from being captured or sold.

It is infrastructure, not a product. Each institution keeps everything that makes it what it is, and gains the shared layer beneath it that no single institution could build alone.

HAPPI stands for the Human Alliance for People and Planetary Infrastructure. The name is the point: an alliance of institutions, holding shared infrastructure for people and the planet rather than for private return.

There are roughly 88,000 community-owned financial institutions worldwide, holding a billion members between them — but each largely operates in isolation, carrying the same regulatory, technology, and cyber obligations as global commercial banks at a fraction of the scale. That fragmentation is expensive, and it is why the sector keeps consolidating.

The missing piece is not another product or vendor. It is a shared operating layer that lets these institutions act together — and that no extractive actor has a commercial reason to build, because keeping them apart is more profitable than connecting them.

It has, and it is the largest example of shared infrastructure in history: the internet. The protocols that let any two computers communicate — the foundational standards underneath everything online — were built as open, unowned commons. No company owns the ability for one machine to talk to another. Trillions of dollars of commercial value were built on top of that commons, and the commons stayed a commons.

But the internet is also the warning. The protocols stayed open; the layers built on top of them did not. Search, payments, social, app stores — useful infrastructure with no binding commitment to stay open gets captured, then repriced and turned against the people who depend on it. The open standard was necessary, but it was not sufficient.

That gap is what HAPPI is built to close. The coordination layer and the shared rails are the open standard. The governance covenants are the part the internet never had: the binding commitments that keep what is built on the commons from being bought out from under the institutions that hold it. Open infrastructure, plus the anchorage that keeps it open in perpetuity.

Because of how it is held, not how it behaves. HAPPI is a not-for-profit foundation that holds the infrastructure in common on behalf of the institutions; it does not own the commons the infrastructure serves.

The governance covenants are binding commitments — not policies a future board can quietly reverse — that prevent the infrastructure being sold, repriced against members, or captured. A vendor’s promise to stay benevolent is worth nothing the moment ownership changes hands. A covenant structured into the foundation is a different kind of guarantee.

No. That is the whole point of holding it in a foundation under covenant rather than in a company that can change hands. There is no equity stake to acquire and no owner who can sell the network out from under its members. The protections are structural and binding, written into HAPPI’s founding Covenant — not a statement of good intent that a later board or buyer could set aside.

The First Cohort of community-owned financial institutions — drawn in deliberate balance from the Global Majority and the Global Minority — specifies what the first release must do, in what order, and to what standard. Not HAPPI alone, and not capital. The institutions that hold it decide what it is. Holding in common begins with deciding in common.

No. The design principle is “light global, heavy local.” The shared layer is built to sit on top of what an institution already runs, rather than rip and replace it, and shared standards mean each institution that joins lowers the cost of joining for the next. Each institution keeps its own licence, board, and member relationships throughout.

The First Cohort is the first group of community-owned institutions to build and deploy the shared infrastructure with HAPPI — drawn in deliberate balance from the Global Majority and the Global Minority. They are not just early adopters: they specify what the first release must do, in what order, and to what standard. The infrastructure is shaped by the institutions that will hold it, from the start.

The build runs over eighteen months, from the close of the Maslow raise to a functioning product in the First Cohort’s hands. The years that follow are where the network compounds — institution by institution, region by region. The full sequence is laid out on The Build.

Every institution that joins adds value for every other one. Shared standards lower the cost of joining for the next, and the things that are stronger when pooled — liquidity, risk, capacity — grow with each new member. And because the governance is built in rather than bolted on, an institution can join without fear of being locked in or captured later.

Register your interest. The first cohort of community- and member-owned financial institutions specifies what the infrastructure must do, in what order, and to what standard — so the conversation begins with telling us where your institution stands. Register your interest →

The work reaches beyond the founding institutions. Whether you are a funder, a researcher, a movement ally, or someone who simply believes the cooperative economy needs infrastructure of its own, there is a way to take part. Start by registering your interest →