Would it make sense to explore a micro payments model for bottoms up democratic funding, unrelated to membership ? A meetup happens every month. Let’s say we put up a UPI barcode somewhere during the event. Inform the audience that we’re looking for participatory funding - no strings attached. Run this as an experiment for 6 months.
No artificial bands/limits need to be placed on a fund transfer - we may get as less as less 10 Rs (“darshini chai”) to whatever - and we need to accept each equally. The hard part here would be not doing gamification or anything that would look remotely like “dark patterns” of fundraising (sorry - can’t the get right word here - but I guess you understand what I am saying here).
There will be management overhead of tracking these micro payments, and I’m sure we have folks who know better how to take care of these things via automation - I can think of Nemo in this context already. It would be a fun project to make a box saying “FOSS United” with our own own audio - but that’s a side activity.