For institutions
HAPPI is forming its founding cohort of member-owned financial institutions. The institutions that join first will help shape the governance, the standards, and the direction of a shared infrastructure designed never to be captured, sold, or used against the communities it serves. Our mission is to place cooperative organisations at the centre of all economic activity — not at its margins.
Founding nodes will be named together at the conclusion of the sprint — as a cohort, not as a sequence.
The problem is not values. Every credit union, cooperative, and community lender in HAPPI's founding cohort already operates on non-extractive principles. The problem is coordination. Each institution can see the value of shared rails, shared interfaces, and shared utilities — but no single institution can justify paying the full cost or taking the first-mover risk alone.
HAPPI is the neutral coordination layer that makes participation the rational choice. Institutions join with the infrastructure they have, not the infrastructure they are required to acquire. Governance is designed so no single institution — and no external actor — can capture the system.
The infrastructure is held by the HAPPI Foundation in perpetuity. Never to be sold. Never to be used to extract from the institutions it serves. Never to serve any one organisation more than all of them.
The infrastructure is not yet built. Registering interest is not signing a contract. What this stage requires is a genuine conversation between institutions that share the diagnosis — that fragmented, isolated, sub-scale community-owned finance is the problem — and are willing to explore whether shared infrastructure is the structural answer.
The cooperative movement has attempted shared infrastructure before. Those attempts did not reach scale. We have studied why — fragmented governance, first-mover risk, vendor capture, and the absence of a neutral coordination layer that no single institution controls. Those are the problems HAPPI is specifically designed to solve. We are watching whether it works. You should be too.
What we can commit to at this stage: a direct conversation, a transparent account of where the build is, and a governance model that is designed from the first day to prevent the infrastructure from being captured by any actor — including us.
Never to be sold.
Never to be used to extract from the institutions it serves.
Never to serve any one organisation more than all of them.
HAPPI is established as a foundation. All infrastructure is held in perpetuity — for the cooperative economy, not for any shareholder, state, or single institution. Founding nodes help define what that means in practice.
The cooperative sector is fragmenting at the moment humanity most needs what it does. The founding sprint is the work of identifying the institutions ready to act at system scale — credit unions, cooperatives, CDFIs, and mutuals who have served their communities through every crisis extractive capital created, who have done it without shared infrastructure, and who are now prepared to build it. Institutions that have looked at what extraction has done to communities and the planet, and decided that the antidote is infrastructure governed for community, by community. When the cohort is formed, Becoming HAPPI begins.
On naming founding nodes
We will not be announcing individual institutions as they join the founding cohort. All founding nodes will be named together at the conclusion of the sprint — when commitments are formalised and the cohort is complete. This is a governance choice: no institution should gain public advantage from joining first, and no institution should face pressure from being named before they are ready. The founding record is collective, not incremental.
A 5-day, 4-night collaborative working retreat for the founding cohort — fully funded for eligible attendees.
Once the founding cohort is confirmed, two representatives from each institution — one executive, one implementation lead — will convene for five days to do the work that cannot be done remotely: building the shared framework, agreed principles, and strategic direction for the first collaborative system build.
This is not a conference. It is not a workshop. It is the room where the cooperative economy's shared infrastructure gets designed by the first people who will govern and use it. What leaves that room is a framework each representative can take back to their board, and a 28-day window for each institution to vote on whether to commit to the build.
Any attendee who requires additional support to attend should assume that HAPPI will do everything it can to accommodate them. Attendance should never be determined by circumstance.
The retreat is preceded by three one-hour virtual grounding calls, held as a group. Attendees are placed into cross-institutional flocks — no two people from the same organisation in the same group — so relationships begin forming before anyone boards a plane.
This is not a commitment. It is the beginning of a direct conversation relevant to your institution's size, jurisdiction, and infrastructure context. We will be in touch personally.
Thank you for registering your institution's interest. We will reach out personally — not with a newsletter, but with a conversation relevant to your institution. That is the commitment we can make at this stage.