# Can Money Serve Life? How to Fund Communities Doing the Real Work with Matthew Monahan

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-great-simplification-with-nate-hagens-6364729/can-money-serve-life-how-to-fund-communities-doing-the-real-work-with-matthew-monahan
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-great-simplification-with-nate-hagens-6364729/can-money-serve-life-how-to-fund-communities-doing-the-real-work-with-matthew-monahan.md
Podcast: [The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens](https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-great-simplification-with-nate-hagens-6364729)
Published: 2026-07-08T11:30:00+00:00
Episode link: https://thegreatsimplification.libsyn.com/can-money-serve-life-how-to-fund-communities-doing-the-real-work-with-matthew-monahan
Audio file: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/thegreatsimplification/TGS226_MatthewMonahan.mp3?dest-id=3235040
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-great-simplification-with-nate-hagens-6364729/episodes/can-money-serve-life-how-to-fund-communities-doing-the-real-work-with-matthew-monahan
Duration seconds: 4062

## Resource

Every year, hundreds of billions of dollars flow through global philanthropy, yet only a small fraction reaches environmental, climate, and nature-related causes. Meanwhile, in small towns and rural communities around the world, a hidden throughline of regenerative work is already underway. This work rarely waits for large-scale funding to begin, but it does need resourcing to grow into replicable movements capable of propelling system-wide change. What would it take to build financial infrastructure that actually gets capital to the people already doing the work of healing land and community? In this episode, Nate is joined by Matthew Monahan, co-founder of the nonprofit Ma Earth, to explore the emerging field of regenerative finance. Matthew digs into why top-down, siloed, and low-trust funding systems keep capital from reaching frontline communities, and how tools like open protocols, decentralized data commons, and blockchains might (with healthy consideration) help coordinate trust and resourcing at scale. Matthew also discusses Ma Earth's collective crowdfunding platform that pairs philanthropic dollars with community fundraising for grassroots land and ecological projects – from mangrove restoration in the Pacific to a farmer's cooperative for war amputees in the Congo – and how anyone can become involved. How might we approach the ambitious goal of attuning money with the health of the planet and the life that inhabits it? Is it possible to use tools like blockchain and crowdfunding to route capital toward life without building a bigger version of the same self-eating machine? And can bottom-up, community-defined funding scale to the size of the problem without losing the trust and specificity that make it work in the first place? (Conversation recorded on June…

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