Why We Build
Green Goods helps communities make their regenerative work visible. Someone cares for soil and trees, clears waste, maintains panels, or teaches a class. The evidence may be scattered across photos, notebooks, and chat threads. A supporter who was not there needs a way to understand what happened and who checked it.
We are building the tools to change that.
The problem
The record of a community's regenerative work stays trapped, and three things keep it that way.
- Proving the work costs more than doing it.
- The tools for proving it were built for the office and the grant report, not for the field.
- The record ends up on platforms the community does not own, so it cannot follow them to the next funder, partner, or tool.
Inside the community, contribution is thanked but not valued. Outside, the people who would support it cannot read it.
What we believe
- The people who do the work should be the ones who are seen for it. Not an intermediary, and not a platform.
- Trust starts with neighbors. A steward who knows the place and the people is a better first reviewer than a distant form. So review in Green Goods is local.
- Tools should fit the field. You can record without a signal, sign in with a passkey, and use the app in English, Spanish, or Portuguese.
- Records should outlive the tool. What a garden records is public and stays readable outside Green Goods.
- Honesty beats polish. We say what works today and what does not yet. Availability and limits are explained beside the relevant guide.
Green Goods grew out of the Greenpill network of builders and local communities, and it is built in the open.
Who it is for
Green Goods is shaped by the kinds of communities it serves:
- Solar teams who keep panels and batteries working for a campus or a neighborhood, and need to show the upkeep that nobody sees.
- Waste crews who collect, sort, and compost, and want a record of what was kept out of the landfill.
- Tree-planting and land-restoration groups whose work takes years to show, and who need a way to mark each season.
- Agroforestry and farming collectives who care for soil and grow trees alongside crops, and want to document the work that keeps the land productive.
- Educators who run classes and workshops, and want to show what people actually learned and used.
Their work is small in any one day and large over a year. Green Goods is built to honor the small work: one tree, one bag, one panel, one class.
Wings of the Ocean volunteers sorting waste, Mallorca, 2021. This is not a Green Goods project. Photo: Victor Janjić, CC BY-SA 4.0; resized by Wikimedia and cropped for display.
.jpg){kind=link}
From shared goals to promises
A garden also needs to agree on what happens next: who will do the work, what support they need, and how the community will know it was done.
Commitment Pooling gives those promises a shared home and rules for checking them. It connects planning with evidence and confirmation, so a community can follow a promise from agreement to review. Financial support, when agreed, has its own conditions and payment steps. It is not guaranteed by a work approval.
Garden promises are part of the 2.0 release, and a promise can carry a G$ reward paid after it's kept. How It Works explains the connection, and Make a Promise shows your next step.
More than money
A tree is not only carbon. It is also food, shade, a lesson for someone's child, and a reason for neighbors to meet. Green Goods uses a framework called the eight forms of capital to name the kinds of value that work creates, so a garden is not judged by money alone.
| Form | What it means |
|---|---|
| Living | Soil, water, biodiversity, and the health of a place |
| Social | Relationships, networks, and trust between people |
| Material | Tools, buildings, and things that were made |
| Financial | Money, and where it flows |
| Intellectual | Knowledge, methods, and practice that was written down |
| Experiential | Skill that hands have learned |
| Spiritual | Meaning, purpose, and connection |
| Cultural | Tradition, story, and the identity of a place |
When a garden's actions are set up, each one is marked with the forms of capital it builds. That lets a garden show the whole of what it does.
A wider frame
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals give communities and supporters a common way to discuss their aims. Agriculture can relate to sustainable food production (Goal 2), solar work to clean energy (Goal 7), and restoration to life on land (Goal 15).
Those connections help explain the purpose of a project. Recording an action does not by itself prove progress against an SDG target. A garden still needs to decide what to measure and show the results.
Built in the open
Green Goods is free and open source. Anyone can read how it works, check it, and build on it. If that is you, start with the builder docs.
Follow the people and records involved in a garden's work.