TimeBank Models
Focus: Community involvement
Grace Hill Settlement House, St. Louis, MO
www.gracehill.org
As a result of shared agreement with neighbors and stakeholders, Grace Hill Settlement Houses work to achieve healthy and economically viable neighborhoods in culturally relevant ways, improving environmental conditions, amplifying the collective voice of the community and fostering a strong economic system.
Focus: Community involvement
Visiting Nurse Association, Bronx, NY
www.vnsny.org/our-services/time-bank/
VNSNY’s Community Connections TimeBanks are a way for people to use their skills, share their passions, meet their neighbors, and lend a helping hand.
Focus: Community health
Community Exchange, a program of the Lehigh Valley Hospital, PA, www.lvhn.org/lvh/Your_LVH/Community/Community_Health%7C2270
Focus: Families with behavior, emotional and/or mental health challenges
Parent Support Network, Rhode Island
www.vnsny.org/our-services/time-bank/
The Parent Support Network is an organization of families supporting families with children, youth, and young adults who experience or are at risk for serious behavioral, emotional, and/or mental health challenges. PSN seeks to strengthen and preserve families and reduce family isolation by building culturally and linguistically competent systems of care through advocacy, education, training, and increased public awareness.
Focus: Seniors
Partners in Care
www.partnersincare.org
Partners In Care Maryland is a community nonprofit empowering older adults to remain independent in their own homes. Time-exchange is at the foundation of our network of support for seniors. The objective is to build community by engaging people to help each other with the myriad tasks involved in everyday living.
Focus: Addressing violence and other health inequities
Sobrante Park Time Bank, a program of the Alameda County Health Dept, Oakland, CA
http://www.acphd.org/healthequity/ccni/sobrante.htm
In 2003, Mayor Brown convened a Violence Prevention Task Force comprised of City and County Agency Directors, City Council Members, Alameda County Supervisors and area Law Enforcement leaders. The Task Force chose to pilot a community capacity-building strategy in two small, targeted high crime neighborhoods – Sobrante Park in East Oakland and the Hoover Historic District of West Oakland. The original name of the Task Force’s project was the Oakland City-County Violence Prevention Initiative. To better reflect the emphasis on both violence prevention and creating safer, more resilient communities, the name was changed to the City-County Neighborhood Initiative.
Focus: Healthcare
Rushey Green Time Bank – London, England
http://members.aol.com/kimmorrissey01/timebank/rusheygreen/
The Rushey Green time bank was set up by Dr. Richard Byng of the Rushey Green Group Practice in partnership with the New Economics Foundation in 2000.
GPs refer patients to the time bank where they can receive a range of services including befriending, running errands, giving lifts, arranging social events, woodwork, poetry writing, teaching sewing, babysitting, gardening, swimming, fishing, teaching the piano, cooking, form filling, and so on. Time is not only given between individuals. Members have helped with Community Health Council mail-outs and in improving the health centre’s own garden. It is the first example of a time bank in a healthcare setting in the UK. Doctors have been able to measure health gain through lower prescription levels of anti-depressants for milder mental conditions’.
Focus: Youth Courts
Time Dollar Youth Court in Washington, D.C.
www.tdyc.org
The Time Dollar Youth Court (TDYC) provides alternative sentencing to first-time juvenile offenders in the District of Columbia and serves as a unique pre- petition diversion program for non-violent offenders. Youth Court enlists young people in creating a new kind of juvenile justice where youth juries have the power to impose a sentence on juvenile offenders and where non-violent juvenile respondents can avoid formal prosecution for their offense by carrying out the sentence imposed by their peers.
Focus: Increasing levels of citizen engagement in public services
TimeBanking Wales (United Kingdom)
www.timebankingwales.org
Other Useful Links
One of the best ways to learn about the benefits and possibilities of community currencies is to hear some stories about them in action. In this section you will read about some of the most successful systems and some of the reasons for their success.
Each example is chosen to illustrate some different application or aspect of community currencies from around the world. There are two examples of time banks supported by WICC in this section BOB Youth Timebank – GlynCoch, Wales and Blaengarw Time Centre, Wales).(see Time Banks supported by WICC).
You will find links to many more community currencies around the world at the Worldwide Database for Complementary Currencies (www.complementarycurrency.org).
Time Centre – Blaengarw, Wales
http://www.creation.me.uk/projects.htm#timecentre
Blaengarw Time Centre is based in a hundred year old miners’ welfare hall at the top of the Garw Valley in South Wales. The centre is run by a community organization known as Creation Development Trust, which employs two workers to organize the Time Centre. Local people are encouraged to get involved in a range of community activities: running the community centre itself; taking part in one off community projects such as’ CUT ‘doctors have been able to measure health gain through lower prescription levels of anti-depressants for milder mental conditions.’
Fair Shares – Gloucester, England
http://www.fairshares.org.uk/
Fair Shares pioneered the first person-to-person Time Banks in the UK in 1998, sparking off a movement across the UK. It manages the Gloucester Time Bank, the North Cotswolds Time Bank and the Newent Time Bank. It has also brokered an innovative arrangement for prisoners in Gloucester Prison to earn time credits which they can give to family members who receive services in their community.
South Powys LETS – Wales
http://www.splets.org.uk/
One of the few surviving Local Exchange Trading Systems in Wales. Begun in 1993 and based in and around the beautiful Brecon Beacons National Park in South Wales.
Run by volunteers with one funded development officer since 2002, supported by the National Park Authority and Environment Wales. Person to person exchanges with an emphasis on regular social events, working parties such as gardening gangs and craft workshops, fairs and exhibitions. Its currency the ‘Beacon’ was featured on BBC Wales News as an alternative to both the pound and the Euro!
New Moray LETS – Scotland
http://www.newmoraylets.org.uk/
Possibly the highest trading levels of any LETS anywhere, 1 million LETS credits traded since its beginning in 1997 if its website is to be believed. Based in rural Scotland around Forres.
Elderplan Member to Member- New York
http://www.elderplan.org/programs/member_to_member.shtml
Elderplan is a health corporation based in New York City. Elderplan’s award-winning Member to Member volunteer program allows members to share their different abilities to help each other. Member to Member brings a helping hand to Elderplan members in need, whether it is walking with a member to the store or Elderplan’s “University without Walls” program. It was one of the first applications of Edgar Cahn’s Time Dollar concept in the 1980s
Fureai Kippu – Japan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fureai_kippu
Fureai kippu is a Japanese community currency created in 1995 by the Sawayaka Welfare Foundation so that people could earn credits helping seniors in their community. The basic unit of account is the hour of service to an elderly person. Sometimes seniors help each other and earn the credits, other times family members in other communities earn credits and transfer them to their parents who live elsewhere.
Ithaca Hours – New York
http://www.ithacahours.com
Founded in 1991 to keep wealth in the community and help local businesses in the town of Ithaca in New York State. A rare example of a community currency issued by Fiat rather than Mutual Credit (see How currency is issued). Much imitated across the USA. They also claim to have hosted a top official from China’s Central Bank in 2001, who was looking seriously at this mechanism as a tool for economic development in China.
Salt Spring Island Dollars – Canada
http://www.saltspringdollars.com/
Salt Spring is an island off British Columbia with a population of 10,000 people and hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. The concept of Salt Spring Island Dollars was the result of roundtable discussions of the Sustainable Salt Spring Island Coalition in the year 2000. They decided to create the Salt Spring Island Dollar which is purchased with Canadian Dollars and spendable in most local businesses.
Currency is available as notes and coins designed to a high standard by local artists and with anti-counterfeit properties. It is administered by the Salt Spring Island Monetary Foundation. Many notes are kept by currency collectors and the remaining Canadian Dollars are invested in community projects.
Chiemgauer – Germany
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiemgauer
Chiemgauer is the name of a regional currency started in 2003 in the Chiemsee region of Germany. It is named after the Chiemgau, a famous region around the Chiemsee. Christian Gelleri, a high school teacher, started this project with his economics students who are in charge of designing and printing vouchers, administration, accounting, advertising and other services. Now it is supported by a German regional currencies’ network called RegioNetzwerk. It has attracted local organic supermarkets, hotels and a wide range of local businesses to take part.
Berkshares – New England, USA
http://www.berkshares.org/
BerkShares are a local currency designed for use in the Southern Berkshire region of Massachusetts with issue by BerkShares, Inc., a non-profit organization working in collaboration with the Southern Berkshire Chamber of Commerce, participating local banks, local businesses, and local non-profit organizations. Local people are encouraged to use the currency in order to make a conscious commitment to buy local first. They are encouraged to take personal responsibility for the health and well-being of their community by laying the foundation of a truly vibrant, thriving local economy.
SANE Community Exchange System – South Africa
http://www.sane.org.za/
The SANE Community Exchange System (CES) is internet based but also has paper-based ‘branches’ for the computer-less. The CES serves two basic functions: it is an online money and banking system and it is a ‘marketplace’ where people sell goods and services. The CES is an international complementary currency system with 50 exchanges in eight countries (October 2006). All exchanges can trade with each other and credits earned in one area can be spent in another. LETS-style groups are invited to join the CES network and become part of an expanding, global ‘new money’ system. The CES has seen phenomenal growth in the past year and will see even more in coming years.
Red Global Trueque – Argentina
http://www.trueque.org.ar/ (Spanish only)
The Red Global Trueque is a network of local barter markets in Argentina which allowed many thousands of people to survive during the crash of the national currency in 2001.
This list courtesy of www.timebankingwales.org.uk, the website for TimeBanking in the Wales
