(Q) Do new users realize after participating that their time has real value? Is there sort of an 'ah ha' moment for most new users when they finally understand how great the Time Bank is?
(Chris) Many do.
(Q) Does the time banking practice leave users with a real sense of worth and respect?
(Chris) For many, yes, they do. That can depend on how often they engage with the TimeBank and how they earn and spend their Time Dollars.
(Q) I read that last year the Lutheran Services in America began brainstorming with you about Time Banking and CareBanks. Does your organization have direct partnerships with any of the large religious organizations in America?
(Chris) Not yet. It will happen eventually and we look forward to the day when it does.
(Q) What are some of the most interesting time based transactions you have ever encountered?
(Chris) I'm actually thinking of the young people in Rhode Island. You know better than I do Edgar, I did not actually meet them, These are kids who were medically defined as having schizophrenia, bi-polar or extreme autism. They would have normally had to be institutionalized because of how acute that was, we are not talking minor [medical issues] A parent support group has emerged where the parents together have in effect formed an extended family. The kids themselves, I've sat in with them, they have their own secessions. They talk about what it's like to be on the medications and they talk about what it's like to have a sister who one minute is smiling and the next minute she's got a knife and she's going at your throat. Now they've created a whole, what they call "Voices", and they put on performances and they go from high school to high school sharing their stories on what it's meant to be there for each other and not to feel rejected but in fact they have mutual acceptance. That has been awesome.
I remember in Los Angeles at one point there was, in the early days of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a local health organization, which was subsequently bought up by a commercial operation, and so they stopped the time bank, I remember them saying kids would take seniors to church in and watch their cars to make sure nothing happened to them in order to get their tattoos medically removed. Well I couldn't make that up you see! I remember hearing up in Maine that somebody put in he teach people how to carve avocado pits. Probably not a mass market for that..
(Chris) Also the fashion show, it's not that this is now so unusual, this has become one of the things that time banks do quite commonly. I remember the very first one just how amazing it was. It was in a community that was so divided and so tense around untrust, a lack of trust so they put on a fashion show, Time Banks put on a fashion show and the members all contributed their time to make it happen. It was the teenagers and the seniors. It was so amazing because they put on hip hop music and these seniors came out in these amazing clothes that they had brought out of their closets. The teenagers where wearing their wild clothes and it was just an amazing thing and the community was just so elated with itself. There was cheering and laughter...it was just an amazing thing.
(Edgar) In Madison, they came up with a Pet Parade! So you just don't know what people are going to invent, I guess this my answer. But what this does is unleashes enormous creativity and ingenuity
(Chris) One more. Also what we are sharing with you are more group projects and I think that is a very important piece of TimeBanking how as TimeBanks mature they tend to develop richer and richer group projects. In Sobrante Park, the one in Oakland, one of the reasons for creating the TimeBank was the gang violence between Hispanic gang members and African American gang members. Apparently for some year there's has been this weird tradition, where on a day in May, I think it's the 11th of May, the gangs really had a kind of shootout kind of day, they battled it out. So the members of the TimeBank, the young people and the seniors again, and I think it might have grown out of initially the idea of having a fashion show, but now they have an anti-gang day. They partner with one of the local schools and all day long while this gang activity is terrorizing the neighborhood, they have celebrations of community in the school, in the school auditorium. The seniors prepare all the food and the young people prepare all the entertainment. They keep going at it all day, a celebration of their community.
(Edgar) A couple of other examples: There has been child birth in Maine paid for with Time Credits, paid to the midwife for all the training. There have been wedding and funerals. I've seen an 85 year old former nun changing the oil and doing basically what Jiffy Lube does for members of the TimeBank. You just don't know what you are going to see.
(Chris) The ones that are most interesting are not the strange or quirky exchanges. It's the ones that transform people's lives that are most interesting to me. Like the elderly woman who earns Time Dollars doing small sewing jobs. She sews lost buttons back onto shirts and other items of clothing, and in return she can call on members of her TimeBank to take her shopping, or take on chores that would be hard to do. She has the help she needs. She can feel good about asking. She is connected to a support system of people who value what she can do. Or the young person who earned Time Dollars as a juror in a youth court, and learned in the process that choosing to go down a path of being helpful or being destructive is a choice that he had the power to make.
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