Cormunity: 

Becoming a Shareholder in Yourself

By Campbell Auer


The Idea

In 1980, I was on a roof in Prescott, Arizona, helping my sister build her house. Below me: open trails, big skies, juniper, and a land still breathing. Beyond that: roads unspooling, parking lots encasing nature, a world accelerating toward something that felt wrong in a way I couldn't yet name.

Something inside me said: There has to be another way.

I didn't plan to spend the next four decades thinking about it. But the vision took hold. It shaped my path as an artist and designer, and it never let go.

The idea was simple, and it came from business — a world I knew alongside design, thanks to an architect father, a sculptor mother, and my own training in both. I looked at the corporate structure — the stockholder model — and asked a question that changed everything for me:

What if a person could be a shareholder in their own self-worth?

Not a shareholder in a company's future profits. A shareholder in their own becoming — their growth, their creativity, their care for others, their presence in a community. What if there were a structure that recognized and protected that investment the way a corporation protects financial equity?

I didn't want to call it a corporation. Too much baggage — greed, extraction, power hoarding. So I dropped the "p." Moved from Corp to Cor — Latin for heart, for core. Merged it with community.

Cormunity.

A structure with the legal strength of a corporation and the purpose of a village. A place where your worth isn't measured by what you produce or what you own, but by who you're becoming and what you bring to the people around you.

This is one person's idea — born on a rooftop, shaped over forty years, offered here not as a finished answer but as an open invitation. Take what speaks to you. Build on it. Make it yours. That's how it was always meant to work.


The Problem It Solves

Think about the people you know — maybe yourself — who spend years caring for an aging parent, raising children, mentoring someone who needed guidance, holding a family or a neighborhood together through a difficult season. None of it registers as "value" in the economy we all live inside. There's no column in the ledger for presence. No line item for compassion. No metric for showing up when someone needed you and staying until they didn't.

Meanwhile, the only contributions that do register — financial transactions, productivity numbers, market performance — have built a world where most people feel invisible despite being essential.

This isn't anyone's fault. It's the shape of systems that evolved to solve real problems — how to trade across distances, how to coordinate among strangers, how to scale trust beyond a village where everyone knows each other. Each solution worked, but each one narrowed what counts as "value" a little further. Thousands of years of economic evolution, and we ended up with systems that can move money around the globe in milliseconds but can't see a grandmother teaching a child to sing.

Cormunity doesn't reject those innovations. It uses them. But it widens the lens back to where it started: the whole person, in all their dimensions, seen and valued for everything they actually bring.


How It Works

The Charter

Every Cormunity begins with a legal charter — the same foundational document that any corporation files, carrying the same legal standing that "corporate citizens" have held since the 1800s. But where a traditional corporate charter establishes a duty to maximize profit for shareholders, a Cormunity charter establishes a duty to maximize the development and well-being of its members.

This isn't symbolic. It's structural. The charter gives a Cormunity the legal right to own property collectively, enter contracts, manage resources, and govern its own internal affairs — all directed toward human growth rather than financial return.

The same legal technology that has historically consolidated power gets repurposed to protect people.

The Self-Worth Ledger

This is the engine. Instead of a bank account that tracks dollars, each member has a ledger that tracks contributions — but not the way a timesheet does. The ledger records what others witness in you and what you recognize in yourself:

Every entry connects three things: who contributed, what was created, and who witnessed it. This keeps worth human-centered and relational, not abstract.

Entries require multi-signature validation — like two trusted people co-signing a memory before it becomes part of your story. This prevents gaming, ensures honesty, and mirrors the way trust actually works: not through surveillance, but through relationships.

The ledger isn't a score. It's a mirror. It reflects who you're becoming, and that reflection can be drawn upon for access to shared resources, participation in decision-making, or exchange with other Cormunities.

A practical note: Cormunity doesn't ask anyone to abandon the existing economy overnight. During the prototype and early growth phases, the self-worth ledger operates alongside conventional currency — supplementing it, not replacing it. You still pay your electric bill. But inside the community, a whole dimension of your life that was previously invisible starts to carry real weight. Over time, as the community's internal economy strengthens, the balance between external currency and internal worth can shift at whatever pace feels right for the people involved. This is a transition, not a leap off a cliff.

The Four Pillars

Cormunity rests on four pillars that function as one integrated system. They aren't a menu to choose from — they're more like the legs of a table. Remove one and the whole thing tips.

Legal Autonomy & Participatory Governance. The charter creates a protected space where new ways of valuing people can develop. Inside that protection, governance is participatory: rotating leadership, transparent councils, decisions flowing through deliberation with ultimate authority resting in the full assembly of members. No permanent power concentrations. Every voice — regardless of background, ability, age, or status — carries weight.

Living Currency. The self-worth ledger recognizes contributions that conventional economies make invisible. Worth isn't a fixed pool being redistributed — it's regenerative. When you contribute, you don't take from someone else's share. You expand what's available to everyone. This shifts motivation from competition to collaboration.

Regenerative Ecology. Human systems operate as beneficial parts of larger ecological systems, not in opposition to them. Food production is woven into community spaces. Buildings work with natural cycles rather than against them. Ecological restoration is valued in the ledger — not as charity, but as foundational community work. The health of the land and the health of the people are understood as the same health.

Augmentative Technology. Technology serves people, never the reverse. Blockchain provides decentralized, tamper-proof verification without a central authority. Smart contracts automate community agreements transparently. All systems are open-source — members can examine, modify, and improve them. Privacy is built in by design: you control what's visible, and witnessing is always voluntary, never tracked.

This is where the surveillance question gets answered directly. The same era that gave us computers and cell phones gave us justified anxiety about who's watching. Cormunity's technology is designed from the ground up to augment human connection, not extract human data. The difference between a surveillance system and a witnessing system is consent, ownership, and purpose. In Cormunity, you offer your presence as a gift. You are never monitored as a subject.

These four pillars create something none of them can achieve alone: a community where individual growth and collective flourishing aren't in tension — where becoming more fully yourself is also the best thing you can do for everyone around you.


What It Looks Like

Cormunity isn't one thing. It's a framework that adapts to wherever people are, honoring the culture, ecology, and needs of each place.

A rural village might center on soil regeneration, shared harvests, and intergenerational skill transfer. The ledger values elder storytelling alongside farming labor. Infrastructure is earth-based meeting houses, solar networks, fiber mesh for connection.

An urban neighborhood might focus on revitalization, skill-sharing, and cultural resilience. Public art, restorative justice circles, youth mentorship, food cooperatives — all generating recognized worth. Vacant lots become community gardens and maker spaces.

A digital cooperative might organize around global collaboration, remote mentorship, and decentralized innovation. Code contributions, peer learning, community moderation — all recorded, all witnessed, all valued. Geography becomes optional.

An intentional community might design around cultural immersion, heritage restoration, and regenerative living. Circular gathering spaces, modular eco-dwellings, environments that remind you what you're part of.

These aren't blueprints to be copied. They're invitations to be interpreted. Each Cormunity evolves its own configuration of growth, recognition, and belonging — shaped by the people who build it, for the people who need it.

Scaling Through Federation

Cormunity doesn't scale by becoming one giant entity. It scales through federation — independent communities connected by shared protocols and inter-Cormunity councils. A mountain village that values soil regeneration and a digital collective that values code literacy both operate within the same framework, recognizing each other's contributions across different contexts.

Your accrued worth travels with you. Move from one Cormunity to another, and what you've built — your ledger, your witnessed contributions, your trajectory of becoming — comes with you. Diversity isn't a problem to manage. It's the engine of the whole thing.


The Voices This Makes Possible

When a structure finally sees people for what they actually contribute, certain voices become audible for the first time. These are the kinds of things people say when the framework works:

An elder: "In the old world, I was economically worthless after retirement. Here, my capacity to hold space for others' growth is my wealth."

A developer: "I spent years protecting my knowledge as job security. Now my security comes from how effectively I can help others understand what I know."

A facilitator: "In traditional workplaces, I was valued for what I produced despite my sensitivity. Here, I'm valued for how my sensitivity enriches what we produce together."

A person who once guarded her data: "In the old paradigm, I protected my location data because it would be used against me. Here, I offer my presence because it's recognized as gift."

A community founder: "We didn't abolish leadership. We multiplied it. Everyone here has domains where they lead and domains where they follow."

If you recognize yourself in any of these voices — the caregiver, the teacher, the quiet one who holds things together, the creative who was told their gifts weren't practical, the elder whose experience was discounted, the young person whose potential hasn't found a structure that believes in it — this idea was built with you in mind.


Why Now

What began as an observation on a rooftop in 1980 is actionable now for three reasons:

The technology exists. Blockchain, smart contracts, decentralized identity systems, open-source platforms — the tools to build transparent, peer-validated, community-owned ledgers are here and maturing rapidly.

The legal precedent exists. The corporate citizen framework has been tested for over a century. DAOs, cooperatives, mutual aid trusts — the legal templates for community-as-entity are available and open-source.

The need is personal. This isn't about abstract crises. It's about the person who spent a decade caregiving and has nothing in any ledger to show for it. The artist whose work enriches a community but doesn't pay rent. The retiree whose wisdom is treated as economically irrelevant. The young person told their only path to worth is through competition. These systems weren't designed to see you. Cormunity was.


What You Can Do

The first step isn't to scale. It's to prototype.

Gather a small group. Five people, ten, twenty — enough to form real relationships, small enough that witnessing comes naturally.

Write a charter together. Define your purpose — not in corporate language, in human language. What do you value? What do you want to grow? What does flourishing look like for your specific people, in your specific place?

Start the ledger. It doesn't need blockchain on day one. It needs honesty. Begin witnessing each other's contributions — the visible ones and the invisible ones. Write them down. Let people see themselves reflected.

Build from there. Add structure as you need it. Technology when it serves you. Legal formalization when it protects you. Federation with other groups when connection enriches you.

Cormunity is not owned. It is not trademarked. It is not controlled by any single person — including me. It is grown, through iteration, relationship, and shared experimentation. One point of worth at a time.


Where This Came From

Decades before any of this had a name, I sailed into a remote Mexican fishing village — no roads, no electricity, no running water. I hollowed out half of an old hand-carved fishing boat into a tiny home, lit by candles. Each evening I taught the village children English by candlelight and shared whatever fish the fishermen could spare.

No ledger. No blockchain. No charter. Just people choosing to see each other's worth and building something from that recognition.

What emerged wasn't a system or a theory. It was the feeling of being seen — fully, without transaction — and seeing others the same way. A community born of mutual care, trust, and the simple act of being together.

Everything since — the four decades of design, the legal frameworks, the technology, this document — has been an attempt to make that feeling portable. To build a structure strong enough to hold it at any scale and transparent enough to never betray it.

Whatever your background, your age, your circumstances, your abilities — if you've ever felt that who you are and what you give should count for more than any system has recognized, then this idea includes you. It was built for you.

You are not what you produce. You are not what you own. You are what you're becoming — and there is a place ready to see that.

Welcome home.