(Q) After so many years of working with Time Banking, is there an ultimate goal, outcome or situation you have in mind, for example a point in the future when Time Banking encircles the planet and is common in almost all countries, cities and regions?
(Chris) It's getting there! I can see TimeBanking being joined by a whole array of complementary and alternative currencies to achieve different outcomes. I have hoped that TimeBanking and other alternative currencies will work together and still believe that will happen, but only when complementary currencies become more familiar to people everywhere.
(Q) What are CareBanks?(3)
(Chris) A special kind of TimeBank that calls on members or a small cluster of individuals to earn Time Dollars on a regular basis so that the member, or one member in the cluster, can have an assurance of receiving help when really needed.
(Q) What kind of larger scale issues could Time Banking help us solve? (pollution, poverty, malnutrition. etc)
(Chris) I don't see Time Dollars tackling larger scale issues in a direct, head-on kind of way. I see them helping to change the nature of a community, the ways that people relate to each other, the esteem in which they hold each other and I see those changes then changing what will be acceptable to them, and what will not be acceptable.
(Q) Less focus on national currency savings and more focus on giving everyone value using a community currency approach.....what kind of community will this create when citizens are not working to buy that new car or increase their credit card limits?
(Chris) I'm going to take the first step on that. Our media are tremendously powerful influence on people's lives and are markets are too. Just to pull something out of the air, an example is women going and paying $350 and $400 for a purse which lasts a year and then they go and buy another one and another one. The messages that are feed into us are so powerful and Time Banking definitely has a different kind of energy and nurtures a different kind of way of working between people.
(Edgar) When I went to the London School of Economics, they asked how can a currency possibly work because for anything to be sustained, benefit received has to exceed cost. That is marginal benefit has to exceed marginal cost for each additional unit of energy you put in. What was the sort of break through realization was that there were two kinds of benefit, one was external benefit...what you can exchange things for in the external world. The other was intrinsic benefit, or what kind of reward would reinforce your sense of value of self esteem. Teachers take lower salaries than they could learn in other situations, all of us who choose to devote a part of our lives to making the world better are saying a part of our pay or what we earn in psychic benefit. So it became very clear that to the extent that Time Banking amplifies your sense of self esteem and amplifies the reward that goes with volunteering that it's external value what you could buy with it would become less important than even of trivial importance. You see the same thing happening if you are a Billionaire maybe but up to a certain point each additional increment of money gives you a sense of security and reinforces but the chief value of money is external and the core value of Time Banking a the sense of reduced aloneness in the sense of self esteem and self worth that it feeds. I think there is a basic human desire and a basic human need to feel that your existence matter and you make a difference that you're being here on this planet matter to someone else. That is a very powerful drive and that is the drive which we want to reinforce.
(Chris) A more caring community where people know they are valued.
Very often when you start talking about time dollars, you almost always hear something like, "are you telling me that a neurosurgeon will only get one time dollar just the same as a Gardner" So then you have to sort of say yes but we are not talking about the economy. It is an interesting thing that you asked earlier on about what it takes to get a Time Bank up and running, and one of the major things that people have to learn is how to talk about time banking in a way that is believable for other people. It's not always easy to do.
(Edgar) We all live in two worlds, we don't realize. As an illustration, let's just take one chore that people still do for themselves such as brushing your teeth. If you had to do that as a market transaction, you couldn't afford to pay an oral hygienist, to come to the house, to brush your teeth to pay for their malpractice insurance, their social security, their benefits. A large part of what we do and learn to do just as we take for granted the air we breath, the water we drink the level of safety in neighborhoods, we take for granted a whole level of economic activity that is keeping the whole society going. There was an economist who measured the amount of un paid labor that now goes on to keep seniors out of nursing homes. By spouses, by kinfolk, by neighbors and friends. When I first looked at that, valued at $10 bucks an hours which is more than minimum wage but less than what you would pay a house keeper or agency to send someone in. Originally it was around $250 or $270 Billion dollars each year. The latest figures I've seen which were revised around 2004 was $350 Billion annually just in the United States. It's not an insignificant amount of unpaid labor. If you just had a small percentage point drop in that think what it would do for the cost of Medicaid, Medicare and health costs. So there is a whole vast economy out there that we pretend doesn't exist. But when we blow it, mess it up or let it disintegrate we have costs that we are not ready for and that is true of pollution and that's also true of central pollution.
(Q) Is there an example you can point to anywhere in the world right now where time banking has altered the societal landscape & outwardly changed the community?
(Chris) Currently, it happens on a small scale. And that might always be so. Communities have become more peaceable, more caring. Divisions between ethnicities have been overcome. Communities where people thought they could do nothing to create change have found that they have a lot they can do. TimeBanks change systems and social structures slowly, almost surreptitiously. But in the end, the change can be pretty dramatic.
(Q) You made this statement in a previous interview, "How not to live as strangers but a large extended family." Do all forms of community currency such as Berkshares, Ithaca Hours and even RiverHOURS help contribute to a stronger community?
(Chris) They certainly can do so. A lot will depend on the intentionality behind the currency. I do think that TimeBanking has community-building at the center of what the currency is all about, in a way that's probably unique.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
