States are retreating from large parts of public life. Markets are failing to meet a lot of people's basic needs. The loneliness epidemic is out of control. And into that gap, communities are stepping up: retreat centres holding people through burnout and grief, cohousing projects helping raise each other's kids, event hosts creating the spaces where people find each other again.
Hosting community spaces, helping people heal themselves and change their lives, living with or alongside friends isn't a side hustle. It's the core infrastructure for a world that is falling apart.
But there's a very difficult part of this that people don't talk about much: how does a community stay financially sustainable? How does it generate revenue so the hosts can keep doing it, how does the community continue? In an age of scary economic precarity and changeability, how can communities be sites of stability and allow more and more people to step away from the rat race and toward lives of connection and care?
My journey
Fifteen years ago I found Enspiral, and it's where I first saw what a community can provide: lifelong care and support, business connections, and friends that have outlasted a single project or company.
Now the word 'community' seems to signify the people who support an influencer/creator or a brand but to me it's not that. It's people who care deeply about something and actively participate in its continual creation.
I've worked on a part of this puzzle, designing governance for DAOs and networks, coaching leaders through change, founding Network Effect to help communities and networks become financially sustainable and building communities of my own.
It's truly exciting and challenging work. It wasn't long ago that I looked back and realised that helping communities unlock value is my calling. But to me there's always been one part that is the toughest nut to crack: the revenue part.
Working with Marin on Coliven means building the financial and operational backbone that lets communities exist. Marin started the platform after building a small community of his own with friends, and seeing firsthand how the tools hosts rely on weren't built for this kind of work. Hosts end up buried in admin instead of focused on the people they gather.
Powering the places where people belong
Coliven helps generate revenue for people running communities, retreat centres, and other in-person gatherings. For a community running events, memberships, or a retreat calendar, Coliven:
- Brings events, memberships, ticketing, and payments together in one place, instead of five disconnected tools: Luma or a home-made interface for events, Patreon for recurring income, forms for collecting info, and Notion and spreadsheets for all the rest.
- Gets hosts paid reliably and lets members join without friction.
- Gives every community a public profile in a directory built for people looking for a place to belong, so hosts get discovered without cold outreach.
- Frees up the hours hosts used to lose to admin, so they get back to the people in front of them.
It features 90 communities worldwide, from retreat centres in Spain to a monastic academy in Massachusetts.
Most event and subscription tools are built for creators, courses, or generic ticketing. Almost none are built for communities specifically. It's a notoriously tricky business model, and that's exactly where we want to help.
Where we're heading
Our goal is to help hosts build healthier economics around their communities, so the people working on and in them can become financially self-sufficient, and the work becomes something that lasts, not something that a few brave souls do despite the circumstances.
We're working on building a volunteers page, so all the messy management of how volunteers find out about your place or event, sign up, confirm dates, and so on is handled seamlessly.
We're working hard on discoverability, so that one day, people who want to find transformative, ecological, and soulful events and spaces will know exactly where to come.
If you run a community, host events, run a retreat centre, or lead a cohousing project, come see what we're building: coliven.com
We're talking to as many communities running events as we can right now, to understand what makes their business model hard and build the platform around what they need. Message me, I'd love to hear what's hard about the way you run things today.