Something is blossoming in our little town. Whilst ten years ago this was mainly a farming area, very rural and populated by country folk, now it's becoming the 'surf coast hinterland' and as people can't afford to live on the coast, more young people and families are moving in to enjoy the relaxed atmosphere and cheaper housing prices. It's exciting - with more new people comes new ideas and opportunity to start some pretty cool community projects, should anyone have the desire too.
On Saturday, after the garden project, I went and visited two friends of mine, which for the sake of this post, I'll call Sky and Tom (not their real names). They have two kids and a big block at the end of town, which they have a lovely food forest that's really becoming, fruit trees, and lots of ideas for how to get some alternative community abundance happening.
I love these two - I first met them when I popped over to pick up some plants he had advertised and ended up staying to chat about crypto, herbalism, oneness, depression, permaculture and lots more. He's a wonderful hippie, complete with wearing a sarong about town, which isn't the done thing around here. He makes me laugh with his warm, loving and crazy nature - this is a man with big ideas and crazy airiness that can be hard to ground. His wife is a bare footed earth mother with a strong sense of social justice. When you're with them, you feel embraced. They're the type of people you sit on the earth with, in the dirt with, drink herbal tea with.
Out the front of their property is a nature strip which offers free greens for anyone that's passing. I was delighted to learn this crop was my greens - coriander, lettuce, kale, amananth were all my gifted seedlings from the garden meet up we have once a month. It's a good example of how shared gardens work.
I was meant to do a community leadership program with Tom via the council, but I've been a bit anxious this month as I started work and couldn't take more on. I regret it - it sounds really good, and looks at cultural sensitivities, theories of community and so on. Never mind - Tom is keeping me up to speed.
The idea we are all thinking about is a community centre for workshops, a kitchen for garden produce, a barter/exchange system - a real living space where all are welcomed in an alternative to supermarkets and loneliness. It's idealistic, we know. For Tom and Sky, knowing where to put the space is a hard thing - it costs money to buy land and set something like that up, and hard work to get the council to donate things. Where do we even begin? They're building a geodome and a kitchen and a few tiny homes in their garden, but they need help - I dont have time with my job and my own garden to tend. But the dream is there.
The super way out thing we've been chatting about is how the community exchange system works.
Tom's idea is to create 'WIN' - that's the first few letters of our town name so it works - a kind of economic token that is gained for labour (such as helping prune fruit trees or building a porch) or for produce (a kilo of zucchinis, for example, could equal a certain amount of WIN). This would have to be kept in a kind of ledger, but also depreciate over time (this is Charles Eisenstein at work - hoarding is the FIAT way, creating further class divides, a rich list and more isolation) so that it's in their best interests to SPEND WIN. Win could then be used to 'buy' labour, or preserves made in the kitchen. Perhaps FIAT could be the second layer (rather than the WIN 'token' being so) so everything had two prices - eg 15 WIN for a jar of pickles might be 5 AUD. Any FIAT gained in the 'store' - whereever that might be and whatever form it might take - would be passed on to whoever was responsible for it's production.
Say 'Joan' contributes to a community kitchen day, making passata for three hours. The agreed labour could be 60 WIN, 20 WIN an hour. She makes three jars of passata, which are labelled with the communities logo and her name in small print, with the cost - 5 AUD/20 WIN, or perhaps even a combination: 10 WIN plus 2.50 AUD. The purchase is recorded in a ledger, and at the end of the month, 'Joan' recieves both AUD and WIN. The following month, she buys a jar of pickles from the co-op with her WIN, and volunteers some time weeding as she wants to save some WIN to get someone to come and prune her fruit trees.
The idea is to create a community exchange, but also give the option for people to also have some money in their pockets, and feel part of a community. It also suggests less dependency on mainstream currencies and gives those with less money the means to gain labour and produce and food in exchange for their own efforts rather than paying out of pocket with FIAT.
Now, we love the idea, but actually bringing it to fruition is really tricky. Would people recieve it well? How do people feel about money - is it so enmeshed in their thinking that 'selling' their labour for 'WIN' might sound like a rip off? What if at the end of the month someone wants to 'cash in' their WIN, or what if they move away?
Before anyone says 'why don't you use LOTUS' - I don't want technology to be a BARRIER to community. I want to embrace the older generation's knowledge base and there is NO WAY that they'll get their heads around crypto. We were thinking of a simple card where we wrote the IOU's or WIN amounts, like a passbook for the bank, or a shared EXCEL file or something and/or both. It feels fuzzy - no sooner do I embrace an idea in my head than it scuttles out of reach. Hence, why I'm asking the good folk of HIVE - the brains trust!
In Tom's mind, if this culture spread to other towns, there might be some kind of currency exchange that may work.
It's the kind of thing that can bring community together in a really innovative way.
I'm really interested in hearing from HIVERS and homesteaders what they think of the system. I've very intentionally put this in the LEOFINANCE community as I know there's a lot more people there with an understanding of economics and finances (you'd think!). Plus, I know when they see a gardening post they'll get on their high horse about whether that belongs in LEO, bahahahahahahahaha (that's an evil laugh, btw) - so I might even get a few super finance economics geeks to weigh in!
Have you seen anything like this in action? Heard it in theory? What do you think the problems might be, or the benefits? How might it be fine tuned?
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HIVE!D
I'd thank you for your input, but I have no idea what it means.
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... story of my life...
kind regards!
YES! I've been interested in "local currencies" but I've never really seen one take off. I encountered one here in Denver, once - and then never again. For that program, they had printed little currency "dollars" rather than keep a ledger, which might be easier to manage but negate your idea about depreciation.
Another thing to research might be "time banks" as that is a part of your idea. I wish there was more of those, too. Like, if I could volunteer some hours helping at the vet's office in order to get care for my cats, that would be AWESOME. Vet care is SO expensive in fiat.
One of the best things about these systems is that they value EVERYONE'S labor. At least in the systems I've seen, an hour in the time bank is an hour in the time bank, whether that's doing work that would be paid a lot in fiat, or not, if that were your "job."
Wow! I remember when the RADIO talked about "mountain bucks" : )
https://www.denverpost.com/2009/08/27/colorado-cities-selling-own-limited-currency/
PUBLISHED: August 27, 2009 at 2:48 p.m.
Ohhh that's cool! Yeah the Denver one I saw I think was at a craft fair or farmer's market, but then I never saw it anyplace else.
I love the time bank idea. That's more how I saw it to start, until he introduced WIN. I think a time bank is better - and maybe a roster ie. you volunteer one Sunday morning a quarter, and every Sunday morning is a garden to work on. Say you have 60 people signed up - 12 odd gardens a quarter - you're not going to work every weekend, as long as you have say 5 - 6 people turn up, you put on lunch, delegate jobs - more hands better than one.
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not meaning to spam, just clarifying that https://www.community-exchange.org/home/ gives you the choice of Time Bank or a Local Currency you create, and maybe even a combination of the two - i've not used it for over 5 years so cant remember, and it may have changed.
It would be great to get them on Hive
Something that surfaces occasionally one Facebook is LETS. I've come across a few people who've tried it, but it doesn't seem to be something that ever really gets taken on long term by anyone. Buy nothing groups seem to be going better long term. The premise is the same, but without worrying about keeping ledgers.
Many people are time poor as they try and provide for their families in the system, so earning another currency which isn't fiat is likely to feel low down on their list. It's hard for them to see value in it, when they don't have much time to then take part in that community using the currency. Then with the mention of depreciation, why bother at all, if by the time you've found something you might want to spend it on there might not be enough there? This cycles back to why the Buy Nothing groups might be so successful. Contribute when you want and ask for things when you want without having to worry about whether you have enough of the currency left.
Therefore, these people are also most likely to just give away things like excess produce, rather than worry about figuring out any exchange for it and that kind of detracts from the currency value side for those to whom it is important.
Something like this would work well in circumstances where the majority of people in the area have no other choices any more or in a self sustaining community which is mostly isolated from the rest of society.
Sorry, I'm only really putting out the obstacles here as to why I think these things don't currently catch on. I don't really have any solutions to overcome them, other than saying the freedom of Buy Nothings work well in our current system. I would also add that having fiat and WIN feels like it's only adding an extra layer, especially when fiat covers everything anyway.
Perhaps Tom would be better off starting out with the Buy Nothing model and seeing what works from that. Being in the country, you would certainly be in a different situation to the suburbs, so interest could be better.
NO this is exactly what I wanted to hear. I think one of the problems is that he needs to float his idea with more people and get valuable CRITIQUE (not criticism) rather than having the idea float with just a few people. The obstacles are GOOD!
I agree - I think this would be great for a lot of hippies who don't work much anyway, having chosen to 'opt out' of the system. I also think it'd take some full on organising, a bit like I do with Natural Medicine - media, delegating etc. It would really take some dedication, which is why I'm a bit fuzzy on committing until there is a solid plan that will really work.
It's hard isn't it - you have to be idealist and aim high, but also realistic and earthed at the same time.
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That really is the tough part; meshing the ideals with the reality to bring things to fruition.
You can also add free items/services on https://www.community-exchange.org/home/
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I used to run a few Timebanks in Finland back in the day, until the government and the media scared people off. A few hundred people in a small city can run a pretty functional local community even in the harshest weather conditions, so a datablockchain with NFTs might prove to be the next step.
Community exchange system on a new technology has been an interesting concept to develop, like virtual cat-themed cards as a means of showing appreciation. Abundance instead of artificial scarcity.
Gosh, how did the media scare people off that?
Abundance instead of scarcity - that's the key, right? It's a theme that constantly replays in my head.
How did the timebanks run, out of interest?
The tax officials said they will focus on taxing neighbour help if it is marked in a database, like a Timebank account. And being the most authority-obedient people in the world, soon nobody dared to take part anymore. They worked pretty well, has been already almost 10 years since there has been only one working timebank left, the officials told that if taxing is an issue, do not mark the tokens.
That kind of destroys the whole idea of one hour of work for one and help from someone else, in a more organized way. People used to like the platform a lot, even it was a very old looking site and no money was exchanged. 2 admins was enough for 200 people, organizing one is not an issue, but the people tend to be easily misguided by the media.
Some timebanks now use the aforementioned (in another comment) CES system now, so they can exchange between different regional tokens. https://www.community-exchange.org/home/
That sounds like a great idea to bring the whole community together, literally taking people back to how communities used to work in the good old barter days (not that I ever experienced it).
Bristol, in south west England, used to have a Bristol Pound. That started back in 2012 and according to their website they were up to £1m transaction per year. I think they also had some form local government backing as I read on their website you can even pay your local council tax with it. They're in the process of moving to a digital currency so they must be doing something right.
I've never used the currency before as I don't live in the city, but maybe it's something you can explore. Here's the website if you want to find out more. Good luck!
https://bristolpound.org/where-we-have-come-from/
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That's so fascinating!!! I can't believe I didn't know that. Amazing. I'll look into it.
You might wanna beware of this if it's government backed though. They'll likely end up taxing you on the use of it so they can kill more people!
Well, luckily I read this post in full, because the whole time I was reading, I kept thinking, LOTUS, LOTUS, LOTUS. I understand the technology barrier problem. Well, in short I think tying it the Australian Dollar makes good sense.
This will keep things simple and not make people feel like they have to do currency exchange rate calculations on the fly. Perhaps baby steps can be taken until the day a blockchain currency like LOTUS could step in.
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Haha I know, wouldn't it be great? I can't even get Tom to look at LOTUS and the whole concept was his idea!
Welcome to the LeoFinance finance community :)
I saw under another comment that Tom wasn't keen on even looking at what LOTUS is doing, but the model is right here...
A community token where you're rewarded for your time is literally what Hive-Engine tokens do.
Anything on paper (or even worse a shared excel spreadsheet) is going to be a nightmare to manage and just open yourself up to problems down the track if someone kicks up a fuss.
I'm definitely keen to see what you guys come up with in the end, so don't be afraid to keep sharing this narrative within LeoFinance.
See you around!
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The kind of innovations we need to actively contemplate and act upon going forward if we wish to see true changes! Only getting familiar with the mechanics behind crypto and the different usage models of tokens, so can't give any advise or ideas right now, trying to wrap my head around tokens and how they are used since me and @kaliphae are starting up a community here focused on sovereignty, self-sufficiency and spirituality. Specifically hosting those posts that actively are highlighting methods and solutions or experiments in their own life whether, social ,financial, physical or spiritual. And I was playing around with the idea of creating a token for it in the future, but realised soon I need to learn a lot more than what I understand now.
Cheers, have a glass of organic $wine 🍷
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You can use CES, a worldwide Community exchange system. You choose a name for your own local Points system (i chose CAMBIO when i attempted to set a system up in Puerto Escondido, Mexico http://www.healing-haven.com/puerto-cambio.html ), and you can choose option to offer goods/services all for points, or part for cash.
You can set up your own system here: https://www.community-exchange.org/home/
Heyy! I love this post, thanks for mentioning it! I know of France, they have had a few in different local regions, I found a case study here, I didn't read it entirely it's not really my field, but maybe it can help your research 🙂
https://socialcurrency.sciencesconf.org/conference/socialcurrency/pages/Contrasted_cases._Successes_and_failures_FARE_2.pdf
Oh thanks so much! That's awesome, I will pass it on to Tom as well!
Welcome! Don't hesitate to keep us updated with your finds 🌼
seems like all you really need is a few good operators Minding thir OWN BZZZnesses here... organic or otherwise.
itsa FONZI scheme bruv!
Musk oughta get one ore three of his birds to do a Bee C0o_oP
Sell Honey for HIVE... but im jus stormin!