We Gather

Commune. Learn. Give. We Gather is building the infrastructure for collective action—book clubs, co-working, and blockchain-verified mutual aid distribution.

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Inspiration

I've lived with limited resources and witnessed firsthand what it means to lack financial stability, chosen community, or a support system to help you grow. I've also spent time in spaces that were heavily gated — by money, by networks, by who you know. We Gather was born from the belief that access to community, resources, and opportunity shouldn't be an exclusive those who were created into it, or who have done everything "right" from society's standards.

What it does

We Gather builds real community rooted in shared values, mutual aid, and a collective economy. We start with trust — because without it, nothing else works.

Members come together for book clubs exploring mutual aid and new economic models, co-working sessions to support each other's personal projects, and education and wellness programming that treats growth as something holistic, not transactional. From that foundation of trust and connection, we collectively invest in mutual aid networks doing on-the-ground work in our communities.

How we built it

We deployed a smart contract on Thirdweb to mint and distribute our founding NFT. Members claim their NFT, navigate to our Discord community, and verify ownership to unlock access to all channels.

We also built a custom Discord bot through Discord's Developer Portal that automatically assigns the Founding Member role upon verification, making the onboarding seamless and the membership meaningful.

Challenges we ran into

Our smart contract threw an unexpected error during testing, flagging NFTs as already claimed when they hadn't been. Debugging that required digging deep into how the contract handled claim conditions. We also hit a moment when deploying frontend UI updates severed the connection to our backend, forcing us to carefully untangle and reconnect the two. Additionally, there was much time spent on getting the Discord bot to verify user NFTs.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built this in 10 days. Two web pages, a smart contract, a custom Discord bot, and an original NFT with a team that came in without deep blockchain expertise.

What we learned

That doing is the fastest way to learn. When you commit to building through the confusion, you come out on the other side with both a product and a depth of knowledge you couldn't have gotten any other way.

What's next for We Gather

We're moving toward a fully on-chain community experience for a more seamless and decentralized foundation. Members will vote on community programming, resources, and where to direct the collective 10% investment into mutual aid networks — putting real economic decision-making power in the hands of the people it was always meant to serve. We're also actively pursuing grants to fund the full vision — a thriving, self-sustaining ecosystem where community comes first and the economy follows.

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