Picture the economy as the letter K. Since about 2020 the top arm has gone up: big companies, people who own stocks and property, anyone whose income comes from assets. The bottom arm has gone down: people who live on a paycheck, and the small businesses that serve them. Same country, two different economies.

Closing the K doesn't mean pulling the top down. It means giving individuals and small businesses an upward curve of their own. When neighbors save together and own the value of their own data, the big companies keep growing, and the rest of us finally rise with them.

Since 2015, measured by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Prices on the left, what pay did on the right.

New cars: the index is up +22%; the average new car now sells for roughly $48,000–$50,000 by industry estimates. Homes: median sale price, US, from the Federal Reserve (FRED).

Sources: BLS Consumer Price Index and Average Price Data, BLS Current Employment Statistics, FRED MSPUS. Latest month 2026-09. Updated 2026-11-03. Red means prices outran pay.

Prices climb for everyone, but the way people earn decides which arm of the K they're on. Wages are paid in dollars that buy less each year. Assets, like stocks, homes and businesses, rise with inflation or faster. So a family that rents and lives paycheck to paycheck pays the higher prices without the gains, while a family that owns a home and a retirement account pays the same prices and gets richer anyway.

Big companies sit on the top arm twice: they own the assets, and they raise the prices. Small businesses sit on the bottom arm twice: they pay the higher costs, and their customers have less to spend. That is the gap this community exists to close.

Walmart, Kroger and Amazon know exactly what sells, where, at what price, every hour of the day. A corner grocer, a food truck or a new shop opens blind. That data gap is a big reason the bottom arm of the K keeps falling.

By law, a regular corporation's directors must put shareholders first. A public benefit corporation (PBC) must balance shareholders with a stated public benefit, and report on it. Ours is written into the charter: 50% of profits go back to the community. Scholarships, grants for small businesses, investment in local businesses, support for local schools, and whatever else the community votes for.

Every receipt, every search, every trip to the store is data. Today that data flows one way: to the companies that collect it, and to the data brokers who buy, package and resell it. Analysts put the global data-broker market at roughly $300 billion a year. Brokers like Acxiom, Experian, Epsilon, Oracle and LexisNexis hold files on nearly every adult in America, built from purchases, locations, public records and app usage, and sell them to advertisers, insurers and anyone else who pays.

This isn't about any one company. Google, Meta, Amazon, TikTok, Microsoft, Apple's ad business, X, and the retail media networks (Walmart Connect, Kroger Precision Marketing) all earn from the same thing: knowing what you do and what you buy. Receipt apps do it too. The person who created the data gets nothing.

Here, the community owns the data it creates and votes on who it is sold to. The money that used to flow to brokers and ad networks comes back as Save Points, as community funding, and as data small businesses can afford.

We are not against technology. Better tools should make everyone better off. The problem is how the gains are being split. When a company moves jobs offshore or replaces people with AI, the savings go to the top arm of the K. The people on the bottom arm get the layoff, or the job opening that never gets posted.

Savings and data ownership can't stop that on their own. They can make sure the people on the bottom arm share in what technology creates.

Mom-and-pop shops and new founders get the same kind of local price and demand data the big chains buy, at a small-business price. "$99 a month" is the example figure. The exact plans come once the data is deep enough to be worth paying for, and the community votes on who gets access.

Members vote causes up the list. When the company is profitable, the top of the list gets funded first. The starting list, researched and ready for the community to reorder:

Members can also post their own needs: help for a business, a scholarship, supplies for a classroom.

The founder holds 50% of the votes and the community holds 50%. A proposal passes only with more than 50% of all votes, so neither side can pass anything alone: the founder needs community support, and the community needs the founder. Ties fail. The community's half is weighted by contribution, with a cap per person so no one can buy the vote.

The council decides what gets funded and who the community's data is sold to.

Google, Meta, Amazon, xAI, Microsoft: if you want to put money back into the communities your products learn from, we'll put it straight into the causes above, and tell the community exactly where it went. Reach us through the website.