Currency
Interesting chat yesterday with my friend Jean Russell of nurturegirl.net and the new blog, thriveability.net. She suggests that thriving communities practice a sense of “currency” that embraces both economic and social capital. Currency is anything that “flows.” A community’s flow experience then can include all forms of purchase, barter, and gifts.
What’s interesting is that anonymous monetary currency doesn’t build community. It only, as Jean suggests, “outsources connections.” When I trade my time helping someone start a wiki website for their business for their time doing plumbing or editing for me, a relationship builds. When I hand someone ten dollars for an item at Target or Whole Foods, no relationship builds in that transaction. In a monetary currency economy, flow occurs without the building of relationship. In a gift and barter economy, relationship is formed.
January 26th, 2008 10:34
People have been experimenting with ‘community currencies’ in communities on every continent for the last 25 years. This movement is beginning to come of age as we learn how to design more robust systems for sustainability. Currencies that encourage relationships and protect communities and environments from the ‘outsourced externalities’ of the market and casino economies are an important part of our common sustainable future. For many more links on this subject see my site: www.valueforpeople.co.uk John Rogers
January 27th, 2008 22:06
some local currency links:
How Money Systems Work
http://www.transaction.net/money/
Community Currencies: A New Tool for the 21st Century
http://www.transaction.net/money/cc/cc01.html
a database of active local currencies (a quick way to find people to collaborate with locally)
http://www.complementarycurrency.org/ccDatabase/les_public.html
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the first and second links are to articles that were written by Bernard Lietaer.
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Bernard Lietaer is currently a Research Fellow at the Center for Sustainable Resources of the University of California at Berkeley.
His professional background afforded him access to five different (and usually mutually exclusive) hands-on experiences with money systems, listed here in chronological order:
- For multinational corporations, he developed the first models of global currency management
- He has consulted with developing countries on four different continents about improving hard currency earnings
- His academic history includes a Professorship of International Finance at the University of Louvain in Belgium
- For five years he was head of the Organization and Planning Department at the Central Bank of Belgium, where he was President of the Electronic Payment System
- Finally, in the speculative domain, he served as general manager and currency trader of the most successful offshore currency fund
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