Mira Luna

The centralized creation of money and credit has a profoundly negative effect on local economies, sovereignty, and social cohesion. Bankers value profit at all costs, while locally-controlled institutions tend to prioritize other values like community, justice, and sustainability. Communities can regain some control of the flow of money and credit by issuing their own currency as a complement to conventional money. Local currencies can take the form of electronic barter networks, debit cards, mobile phone payments, Timebanks, or old-fashioned cash.

By altering the flow of resources, community currencies (CC) take power away from multinational corporations and put it in the hands of more accountable local entities. While community currencies can’t be too similar to or compete with national money, most countries allow it, and some, like Venezuela and several countries in the E.U., support their development. According to CNN, mediating underemployment and poverty is often a prime motivator for establishing a local currency, but there are also other specific purposes, such as small-business incubation, propagation of community gardens, and provision of healthcare for the uninsured.

Starting a community currency is not for the faint of heart. It takes a dedicated team years of effort. Learning from others’ experiences is essential. Here are some tips I gleaned from the experts and through my own experience. Find a group of people with common ground that are easy to get along with. It’s important to share goals and values with your core group, otherwise your project will be pulled in many directions. You may split into separate projects at some point; that’s often better than trying to duke it out with people who want to do their own thing. Focus on quality volunteer recruitment. Don’t get discouraged when people come and go.

1. Define your goals and prioritize them

Do you want to support local business or low-income folks? Do you want to encourage ridesharing or reward senior care? You may have many goals — local currencies can help alleviate many problems — but be clear about your priorities and target audience as this will shape all of your decisions, including what kind of currency you use.

“A currency is never an end in itself, but has to be seen as a facilitator of flows within the system of a whole community and economy,” says local currency expert and author John Rogers. “Its essential systemic role is to match underused assets and unmet needs.” The community meetings I held attracted all kinds of personal agendas and wacky plans that had no practical application. Your goals will be your compass.

2. Pick your tool appropriately and make it easy to use

Currencies are not one-size-fits-all. It is crucial that you pick the right tool, with the option to expand into multiple tools later. It should be as easy to use as the other kind of money. REAL Dollars of Lawrence, Kansas, ended because businesses didn’t have an easy way to spend them. Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility switched to open-source software for their business-to-business exchange to customize their interface and make it simple to use — a very smart investment.

3. Know your community

If your tool is online, but your community is mostly offline, it won’t get used. How does your community use money, what are its assets, and what does it need? Design a plan based on the reality of your community, not just on your own ideals. Whether you are working with businesses, nonprofits, or community members, survey them or conduct focus groups to test the new currency before you finish your design.

4. Do your homework and get a mentor

Choose a group that’s done a project similar to yours. Look up case studies that have worked. Many people sail out on a currency expedition without a map. Learn from others’ mistakes. Your membership and partners will trust you more if you’ve done your homework.

5. Define your governance and organizational structure

Like any project, you need good governance. John Rogers harps on this point: “Some people tell me off for going on about the importance of governance in getting community currencies to fly. They say a well-designed CC ‘should run itself.’ That’s a nice theory, but I don’t know any CC that has stood the test of time without some form of governance at work, i.e., someone making decisions.”

People will expect responsible and transparent governance for a resource as valuable as a currency — that trust determines its value. Encourage diverse community participation and representation in your governance, especially from your members. If you want to operate as a volunteer or worker cooperative, see my article on worker co-ops. Bay Area Community Exchange is a hybrid of a member and a worker co-op, though many currencies are either run as traditional nonprofits or business bartering exchanges.

Your decision to be a business or nonprofit will be determined by your goals, and currency type. Only entities that have charitable or educational aims can be nonprofits. That’s not to say your business can’t operate like a nonprofit, but you won’t be eligible for grants and donations, though you may be able to get small investments.

6. Define your geographic area

It may be helpful to incubate your currency in a smaller community. However, a wider geographic area may provide the diversity of services and goods that makes a currency useful. Too wide an area though, like the U.S. Southwest, may be meaningless and not effective in building trust and solidarity. Ideally, it would be an area diverse enough to provide most of the necessities of life, and small enough to allow direct exchange, community-building, and accountability.

Regional currencies have done well partly for this reason. If you don’t grow food in your community, you may want to expand your reach to farming areas. If you haven’t lived in your area for long, ask for advice from long-time locals who may have a sense of the resources and their flows.

7. Outreach through events

Hosting events to promote your currency and attending other groups’ events raises consciousness, develops alliances, recruits members/users and volunteers, and builds community. Think about your target audience and meet them where they are. Swapmeets and skillshares are useful demos of the currency that give a more concrete feel. Offer to speak, host a booth, or organize trading at relevant conferences, festivals, markets, and other events to promote your currency to potential members with aligned values.

8. Develop partnerships and take them seriously

Find allied organizations to help recruit members/users, develop programmatic partnerships, and raise your status in the community. An ally may serve also as a fiscal sponsor to bear the burden of organizational tasks while you focus on organizing. Choosing partnerships should depend both on your goals (for example, pick an environmental organization to support gardening or a social justice organization to reach low-income groups) and their ability to provide support, such as event space, outreach, trainings, or programmatic development. A good way to begin a partnership is to do a presentation to their staff and then ask them if there is one small thing they’d like to achieve by using the currency, like a website upgrade, and help them do that. Partnerships work best as a two-way street.

9. Keep the currency circulating

Bernard Leitaer, who is often considered the godfather of community currencies and helped design the Euro, says, “This is where a lot of community currencies have failed. They have neglected to close complete circulation patterns, and as a result… it tends to pool in particular parts of the system.” To keep the currency flowing, identify unmet needs and underutilized resources in your community, especially those not served by the conventional system. Be a matchmaker. If seniors need companionship and your pet shelter needs socialization for its animals, or you have unemployed people without job skills and a nonprofit or business startup that needs volunteers, you may have a match.

One of the biggest mistakes is assuming the currency will do everything itself. One or more exchange coordinators are vital, particularly in the beginning. Visiting Nurse Service of New York’s timebank has a bilingual or trilingual coordinator for each targeted community. Regular communication through email, newsletters, and your website reminds members what’s offered and needed, and the importance of mutual aid. Otherwise, members forget and default to using conventional money. Many currencies publish quarterly newsletters with directories of offerings.

Working on circulation means creating ways to both earn and spend currency. One way to increase circulation is to target entities with high-demand goods or services, but make sure they don’t over-commit themselves. One popular health food store ended up frustrated with loads of hours (the local currency) that they couldn’t spend, so they quit accepting it. Set up limits to make it more sustainable, like using vouchers during slow business hours only or on overstocked goods.

10. Use your currency to fund your currency

Hey, the government does it, why can’t we? As long as members agree it’s a good use of resources, don’t be shy about using your currency to pay staff, reward volunteers, put on events, or do marketing. Currencies are notoriously hard to fund. Relying on external donations can make the short-term sustainability of your project slightly more likely, but the long-term more precarious. Using your currency to fund your project is also good practice in learning how to use it. Membership or transaction fees are also a good practice. However, it’s helpful to lower the barrier to entry as much as possible in the first year or two so you have more members offering diverse skills and goods to increase your currency’s value (fees may slow that process).

Think about the option to pay member dues with volunteer work to support your currency project. A sparse directory with few members is not likely to encourage trading, as the now defunct Berkeley BREAD discovered. One of its most active members realized the currency she was earning with her counseling services would not be useful for anything she needed, so she stopped accepting BREAD. Alternatively, if you have lots of useful stuff in your store, people will flock to it.

11. Don’t give up but be willing to change direction midstream

Currencies take at least a few years to establish. In the meantime, you’ll have fun, make friends, and get some of your needs met. New Earth Exchange in Santa Cruz, California, went through several incarnations over the last several years to find better ideas instead of being stuck on their first idea. Now they are pioneers integrating an online business bartering exchange with a paper currency called Sand Dollars. It’s a lot of work. Have fun doing it, and you are sure to grow.

This article was originally published in 2012 and was updated in 2018. This article is part of a series of action-oriented guides that align with Post Carbon Institute’s Think Resilience online course. The Think Resilience course prepares participants with the systems-level knowledge needed to take meaningful actions as suggested in this and other “How to Share” guides in the series.

Header image by Jonny McKenna via Unsplash

The post How to start a community currency appeared first on Rights Matter.

Reposted from https://www.filmsforaction.org/
By Films For Action / filmsforaction.org / Oct 22, 2021

Our present moment is saturated in dystopian, apocalyptic fantasies of the future.

As the late Mark Fisher said, "It's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” We can envision a thousand ways that humanity might destroy itself and the rest of the world, but positive visions of the future remain severely lacking in comparison. Why is that?

The Dark Ages led to the Renaissance. Feudalism led to capitalism. No era remains stagnant forever. But there's an invisible meme in our culture today that says capitalism is the greatest economic idea humanity has ever invented and it will never be surpassed. That's why a thousand dystopian visions of the future all imagined that capitalism stayed the same, our economic paradigm never evolved... and then the world was eventually destroyed. Could the two be connected? Is our failure to imagine something better than capitalism going to be what actually leads to "the bad ending" for humanity? 

What this points to, in our view, is a crisis of imagination.

Humans at heart are storytellers, and we enact the stories we tell ourselves. As we've written before, our culture is enacting a story that's destroying the world. If humanity is going to unlock "the good ending," we've got to imagine it first. We've got to imagine ten thousand localized versions of it. That's how things change. 

Fortunately, visions of a more beautiful, compassionate, regenerative future already exist. But since they're not being broadcast daily on the evening news, we've got to dedicate a little more energy towards broadcasting them ourselves. This is what this list of films is for. These films decided that the apocalypse is canceled. Climate change is canceled. Biodiversity loss is canceled. A comeback of this scale has never been attempted before, but that's why it's going to work. Ya dig? The people in these films aren't listening to the folks that say it's too late. They're imagining the future they want, not the future they're afraid of, and they're bringing that future into being.

Whether we're ultimately successful is not the point, and beyond anyone's ability to truly know. The point is that our true nature calls us to choose determination over defeat, and resilience over despair. 

We hope these films inspire the former - that place in your heart that knows a better world *is* possible, and is ready to make it happen.

Bioregional Living: A Permaculture Guide to Food and Energy Independence | Andrew Faust (2020)

31 min · In this 30 minute video, Andrew Faust shares his inspiring vision for greater food and energy independence. It's a guide to feeding and providing power for our local communities in ways that are not just "sustainable" but truly…

The Evolution of Ecological Consciousness | Andrew Faust

The Evolution of Ecological Consciousness | Andrew Faust (2013)
109 min · Permaculture designer Andrew Faust gives us an inspiring and heady narrative about the evolution of all life and human consciousness on Mother Earth.

The Economics of Happiness

The Economics of Happiness (2011)
65 min · Economic globalization has led to a massive expansion in the scale and power of big business and banking. It has also worsened nearly every problem we face: fundamentalism and ethnic conflict; climate chaos and species extinction…

Inhabit: A Permaculture Perspective (2015) ($5)

92 min · Humanity is more than ever threatened by its own actions; we hear a lot about the need to minimize footprints and to reduce our impact. But what if our footprints were beneficial? What if we could meet human needs while increasing the…

Renewables Can't Power Capitalism, But They Can Power Ecosocialism

24 min · This is a fantastic video essay. Sit back, relax, and enjoy it like a podcast for some serious knowledge gems.

The Sequel: What Will Follow Our Troubled Civilisation? (2020) ($5)

61 min · Opening with a powerful ‘deep time’ perspective, from the beginning of the Earth to our present moment, BAFTA-winning director Peter Armstrong's new film recognises the fundamental unsustainability of today’s society and dares to ask…

A Simpler Way: Crisis as Opportunity (2016)

79 min · A Simpler Way follows a community in Australia who came together to explore and demonstrate a simpler way to live in response to global crises. Throughout the year the group built tiny houses, planted veggie gardens, practised simple…

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward (2011)

162 min · A feature length documentary by Peter Joseph that presents the case for a needed transition out of the current socioeconomic monetary paradigm which governs the entire world society.

A New Story for Humanity (2016)

102 min · A New Story For Humanity presents a beautifully and sensitively woven tapestry of the rich diversity that is the human family. Featuring interviews on the essential topics of our time: from cosmology to ecology, from ancient wisdom to…

Money & Life (2013)

86 min · Money & Life is a passionate and inspirational essay-style documentary that asks a provocative question: can we see the economic crisis not as a disaster, but as a tremendous opportunity?

Feeding Ourselves (2017)

96 min · Feeding Ourselves weaves intimate stories from the hopes and convictions of rural BC farmers and producers as they navigate undercurrents of uncertainty with our food system. Their commitment to local food culture inspires us to…

Singapore: Biophilic City (2012)

44 min · A whirlwind week in Singapore exploring the amazing story of how Singapore came to be one of the most 'biophilic' cities of the world, on the cutting edge of ecocity design and innovation. Did you have any idea? There has been…

Tomorrow: Take Concrete Steps To A Sustainable Future ($5)

120 min · “Without question, this is absolutely the best and most creative film on the future of humanity and the environment”. — Paul Hawken

Within Reach: Journey to Find Sustainable Community (2013) ($5)

87 min · Within Reach explores one couple's pedal-powered search for a place to call home. Mandy and Ryan gave up their jobs, cars, and traditional houses to 'bike-pack' 6500 miles around the USA seeking sustainable community. Rather than…

The Nature of Cities (2010) ($5)

40 min · THE NATURE OF CITIES follows the journey of Professor Timothy Beatley as he explores urban projects around the world, representing the new green movement that hopes to move our urban environments beyond sustainability to a regenerative…

In Transition 2.0: A Story of Resilience & Hope in Extraordinary Times (2012)

66 min · This film is an inspirational immersion in the Transition movement, gathering stories from around the world of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. There are stories of communities printing their own money, growing food…

Communities Of Hope: Discovering the Ecovillages of Europe (2020)

29 min · COMMUNITIES OF HOPE is a film born from a quest to discover a regenerative culture.

Inner Climate Change: The Change Starts Within You (2020)

66 min · How do we navigate the intensity of emotions and reactions stirred up by climate change, or COVID-19 for that matter? How do we come to a place of peace, compassion, forgiveness and life-affirming action?

Rundown Apartments Reborn as Food-Forest Coliving Agritopia (2021)

55 min · In 2007, Ole and Maitri Ersson bought the rundown Cabana apartment complex in the city and immediately began to de-pave parking spaces to make space for what today is a huge permaculture coliving space and urban food forest. Today, the…

The Hardest Thing I've Ever Loved: Creating a Transformative Culture (2020)

36 min · This 36-minute documentary follows the lives of 5 young explorers on their journey through the 5-week Ecovillage Design Education program in Switzerland, which navigates today's challenges as opportunities to build a regenerative future…

Living the Change: Inspiring Stories for a Sustainable Future

85 min · Living the Change explores solutions to the global crises we face today – solutions any one of us can be part of – through the inspiring stories of people pioneering change in their own lives and in their communities in order to…

The Third Industrial Revolution: A Radical New Sharing Economy (2018)

105 min · The global economy is in crisis. The exponential exhaustion of natural resources, declining productivity, slow growth, rising unemployment, and steep inequality, forces us to rethink our economic models. Where do we go from here? In…

Beyond Elections: Redefining Democracy in the Americas (2008)

95 min · From Venezuela's Communal Councils, to Brazil's Participatory Budgeting; from Constitutional Assemblies to grassroots movements, recuperated factories to cooperatives across the hemisphere -- this documentary is a journey, which takes…

What's a Colloquium? An Oral History of the Natural Building Movement (2020)

76 min · A small band of natural building enthusiasts and outlaws met in a field over 20 years ago at something they called a ‘colloquium’. The movement they created has grown uncontrollably ever since; reviving and innovating ancient building…

India's Healing Forests: Come Home, Be Healed (2019)

51 min · All our knowledge comes from nature and yet nature is a source of many mysteries.

A Convenient Truth: Urban Solutions from Curitiba, Brazil (2006) ($5)

51 min · Cities should be a solution not a problem for human beings. The city of Curitiba has demonstrated for the past 40 years how to transform problems into cost-effective solutions that can be applied in most cities around the world. A…

Prout: Economic Democracy in Practice (2004)

30 min · Economics of Prout covers the basic economic principles of Prout, which offers a viable alternative to the materialistic, anti human philosophies of Capitalism and Communism.

Fantastic Fungi (2019) ($5)

80 min · This is the film of the century! - Films For Action When so many are struggling for connection, inspiration and hope, Fantastic Fungi brings us together as interconnected creators of our world. Fantastic Fungi, directed by Louie…

A Bold Peace: Costa Rica's Path of Demilitarization (2016) ($5)

90 min · 70 years ago Costa Rica abolished its army and committed itself to fostering a peaceful society. It has been reaping the benefits ever since.

The Biggest Little Farm (2019) ($4)

92 min · The Biggest Little Farm chronicles the eight-year quest of John and Molly Chester as they trade city living for 200 acres of barren farmland and a dream to harvest in harmony with nature. Through dogged perseverance and embracing the…

Kiss the Ground (2020) (trailer)

3 min · Kiss the Ground reveals that, by regenerating the world’s soils, we can completely and rapidly stabilize Earth’s climate, restore lost ecosystems and create abundant food supplies. Using compelling graphics and visuals, along with…

Ancient Futures: Learning From Ladakh (1993) ($5)

59 min · Ladakh, or 'Little Tibet', is a wildly beautiful desert land high in the Western Himalayas. It is a place of few resources and an extreme climate. Yet for more than 1,000 years, it has been home to a thriving culture. Traditions of…

School Circles: Every Voice Matters (2018) ($5)

89 min · School Circles is an independent documentary that explores the practice of democratic schools in the Netherlands. The film shows students, teachers and staff members coming together to dialogue, discuss proposals, mediate conflicts and…

2040 (trailer)

3 min · Award-winning director Damon Gameau (That Sugar Film) embarks on a journey to explore what the future could look like by the year 2040 if we simply embraced the best solutions already available to us to improve our planet and shifted…

The Twelve: A Tale of Wisdom & Unity (2019)

75 min · “The Twelve” tells the story of twelve spiritual Elders from around the globe who gather at the United Nations in New York to create a unique ritual for Humankind and planet Earth. By interviewing each one of them in their home…

Regreening the Desert with John D. Liu (2012)

48 min · "It's possible to rehabilitate large-scale damaged ecosystems with the use of permaculture design principles and techniques."

PS. What are these bad and good endings we mentioned? Here's a snapshot:

The bad ending: globalized, unfettered capitalism powered by fossil fuels triggers a series of climate change feedback loops that destabilizes civilization and leads to 10,000 generations living in a permanently impoverished world, where most of the world's biodiversity went extinct, and humanity's worst impulses were magnified by scarcity, war, disease, and famine.

The good ending: humanity takes back control of their governments and enacts measures to prevent the corporate capture of "the people's house" forever, rapidly transitions to 100% renewable energy, stabilizes capitalism before it descends into totalitarian fascism by advancing a raft of democratic socialist programs, then transitions further towards an ecologically regenerative, cooperative degrowth economy, with thousands of localized variations supported by myriad experiments in liquid democracy and dynamic governance. The worst climate change tipping points are averted, and humanity becomes a regenerative, healing presence on the Earth. Measurements for freedom, happiness, health, equality and creativity are higher than ever thought possible during previous eras.

*Note: we could have written the "good ending" in 100 different ways because we don't think there's one good ending. The good endings are infinite. It's up to each of us to present our vision of what that looks like. Work it into being. Refine it. Synthesize it with other great endings. And then we'll see what happens! The future is unwritten, and we can all make a contribution, in collaboration with others.

The post Cancel the Apocalypse appeared first on Rights Matter.