When money can't wait.
Up to $500 per family — no interest, no fees — and what we ask is that you refill it for the next family, when you are able. Its exact legal form is being settled with counsel before the first dollar moves.
- Up to $500 per family, for urgent needs. One at a time.
- Anyone can add to it. Any SEAM family can request from it — what you can access grows with your activity on SEAM, never with a credit score.
- No interest. No fees. No credit check. No collectors. Nothing owed. Ever.
- There is one way to return it: sew it forward — back into the Fund, when you are able.
- 100% of the fund reaches people. SEAM takes nothing. Forever.
- The fund's ledger is public and living — every stitch appended, never edited — and it carries no names, no places, and no dates precise enough to find anyone.
This isn't our invention. It's the tanda, the susu, the qard hasan, the free-loan societies that have run on honor for over a century — the way communities already catch each other. We're giving that tradition rails, a memory, and a public ledger.
A stitch at a time.
A credit score is a number computed about you, sold to strangers, and thinnest exactly when you are newest — which is why it fails everyone who just arrived. A seam is the opposite: you build it, you hold it, and you can see every stitch.
- Your seam holds what you've sewn back — a dollar of room for every dollar returned, to a $500 ceiling. Not “you are a 640”: your seam holds $400. It only ever grows.
- Stitches are your record, not your score. Rent on time, work completed, payments received regularly — all of it is written down for you to show or not show. None of it is a number a stranger can rank you by.
- Vouching offers your room, never your money — and costs you nothing if they fall behind. The fund carries that, because a mechanic that punishes the voucher just outsources chasing people to someone's cousin.
- It frays — it never defaults. Fall behind and any contribution, even $5, restores your standing. No collectors, no permanent mark, nobody cast out, no one told.
- Nobody sees your seam but you. We don't publish who received, we don't keep a map of who vouched for whom, and what you show a landlord is a single positive fact — never a history, never a low number.
- The first stitch isn't yours to earn. Newcomers draw on the Fund's own founding thread, so being new is never the thing that disqualifies you.
Somebody carried you in — that's what you sew forward. And we'd rather lose money to a bad actor than build the thing that would catch them: no credit checks, no biometrics on our servers, no social graph, no relationship map to build one from. We cannot promise what a court will or will not compel — nobody can. We can promise to hold as little as possible, so there is far less to expose, breach, sell, or be made to hand over. The expected loss is priced in. The surveillance is not worth building.
Our commitments.
Missions drift upmarket. Ours is stitched down — these five clauses live in the charter of SEAM's mission-locked entity, not just on this page.
What isn't settled yet
These promises are drafted, not executed. SEAM's mission-locked entity is still in formation. None of these five clauses binds anyone until that entity exists and its charter is signed — and we will publish the charter the day it is.
The foundation in clause 05 has not been formed or named. The fee ceiling in clause 03 has not been set, because there is no live product to set it against.
The covenant lives in SEAM's charter, not this webpage — charters survive; webpages get redesigned.
M-Pesa began as a mission. PayPal began as a mission. Mission-built wallets have a long history of being acquired — and of the mission not surviving the acquisition. Good intentions don't survive cap tables. Charters do — so the promises above live in ours.
Back the Fund.
What a pledge covers
Straight talk: SEAM's mission-locked structure is still being formed, so we collect pledges, not money. Donations open the day the charter — covenant included — is signed, and pledgers hear first. Builders, translators and community partners are just as welcome as money.
The fine print, plainly
The parts people usually bury, kept where you can read them.
Pledges, not money
SEAM's mission-locked legal entity is in formation. Until it exists, we will not take a dollar from anyone.
When the Fund opens
The Fund opens with the pilot corridor once the mission-locked entity exists, with counsel signed off on its charitable structure. Seeded by backers, refilled by the people it helps. If 60% comes back, we will publish 60%.
The seed, exactly
A $100,000 founder commitment, transferred the day the entity exists. The balance shown above accrues at ~4.1%, a short-term US Treasury yield assumption, not a live quote — an estimate the live public ledger replaces at launch.