By: Julie Gabrielli, AIA

One evening last December, Susan Hughes tucked two little girls in with a bedtime story. She then set to work addressing Christmas cards and writing e-mails. It sounds like a typical night in the life of a busy mom, but it wasn’t. For Hughes, it was almost a mini-vacation. How so? Her husband was at home with their baby, and Hughes was down the street watching the neighbor’s children and earning a few “baby-bucks.”

Baby-bucks are the currency of the OakenExchange, a babysitting co-op in the Oakenshawe neighborhood of Baltimore. Participating families are issued forty baby-bucks when they join, and each business-card-sized “buck” is worth fifteen minutes of time. Four baby-bucks will buy one hour of babysitting, nominally worth a reasonable $4. Participants earn extra for minding additional children, feeding dinner, and other challenges.

“It really works,” says Hughes. “People will tempt you with their wireless and cable and wine to get you to come to their house. Now I’m checking my e-mail every day and hoping someone needs a sitter soon.” Hughes runs a graphic design business from her home, and appreciates the flexibility of the co-op. “If I ever have a meeting pop up on a day when I don’t have a nanny, I’m pretty confident that I can send out an e-mail and get someone.”

    Baby-bucks are just one example of a local, or complementary, currency. A local currency resolves the three fundamental problems of national currency: It stays within the community it serves, it is issued by the people who use it, and it is in sufficient supply to meet the needs of that community. While local currency dispenses with the negative aspects of the national currency, it is not intended as a replacement. It simply sets up another means of exchange to catch those needs and resources that fall through the cracks of a nationally and internationally focused system of currency.

    There are more than four thousand of these systems in operation around the world, ranging from small and single-themed to regional and broad-based. In the United States and Canada, there are about five hundred. Examples are as diverse as the human population. In Japan, the “Caring Friendship Ticket” tracks time spent helping elderly residents. In Chicago, school children can earn a repurposed computer by tutoring younger children. In Brazil, a similar program envisions a tutoring chain that enables high school graduates to afford higher education.

    Time-banking is another variation on this concept. The Columbia Association, in partnership with the Horizon Foundation, started such a program in August 2006, with its official kickoff open house held last month. The Columbia Association Network (CAN) serves everyone, from youth to elderly. According to Time-Banking Manager Muriel Stone Nolen, the time-banking concept originated twenty-five years ago with Edgar S. Cahn, J.D., Ph.D., author of No More Throw-Away People. The simple concept of service is based on such core principles as everyone has something to contribute, work can be defined as whatever it takes to build a healthy community, and helping is a two-way street, a service exchange. With time-banking, time is not given a dollar value; every hour spent in service earns one hour of credit. Services are in four categories: individual care, household, transportation and errands, and administrative support for CAN (which is a member of TimeBanks USA).

    Nolen describes how the program works. “If you are interested, you go to the orientation and training session. At that time, you complete an application, selecting those services you can perform. It can be anything: teaching a foreign language, burning CDs, being a phone pal, anything! The two hours spent at the training session go into your time-bank account to get you started.”

    Eventually, all the time tracking and recording will be done online, and members will do their own exchanges directly with each other. In the start-up phase, Nolen and her staff are keeping an eye on the program by making the matches and recording the information themselves. To request a service, a participant calls three days in advance. A staff person makes the match and gives them two or three names. The person then calls and makes the arrangements. Afterwards, the service provider fills out a service transaction form and submits it. The staff members track every transaction and send out quarterly statements, just like the bank. Statements show all transactions and the number of hours earned and used.

    Local currencies and time-banking begin to make sense when we realize that money is nothing more than a symbolic token, a medium of exchange. Economic policies are mostly decided at the international level, even though these policies determine how our economy functions at the local level. Unfortunately, these rules keep money scarce, concentrate wealth, erode social capital, and favor short-term priorities, all of which are at cross-purposes to a vibrant local economy, not to mention ecological health.

    Bernard Lietaer, an international champion of local currency, notes that these programs work well in communities where conventional money is scarce: neighborhoods with concentrated poverty, retirement communities, high unemployment zones, and student communities. The intent is usually to alleviate social problems, which is why the IRS does not tax time-banking systems.

    Starting a local currency requires countless volunteer hours over at least two years. To prevent volunteer burnout, most successful organizations reimburse volunteers in the local currency or create a paid position. A Baltimore Hours program ran from 2001 to 2003. At its peak, there were about two hundred members. According to one of its founders, Brad Johnson, “The system we had was mostly individual services, not businesses. The concept was that people have extra time, but currency is scarce, so we’ll create some.” Johnson went on to explain why he believes the Baltimore Hours model failed. “The truth is people don’t have any extra time since we don’t have mass unemployment or a deflated currency. Also, in a big city there isn’t really the desire or sense of community that would support collective work exchanges without a clear guarantee that you could redeem the money. We really had no goods backing the system.”

    But hope continues to spring for strong local economies and cohesive communities. A new local currency called Anacostia Hours was started last year. The founders issued their first currency in early October 2006, having spent the previous year doing research and organizing. The hub is Mount Rainier, where the formative members of this nonprofit are based. The targeted communities are within the Gateway Arts District: Mount Rainier, Brentwood, North Brentwood, Hyattsville, and the surrounding areas. The currency is available in denominations of one hour, a half-hour, and a quarter-hour. For the purpose of reporting income to the IRS, one hour is valued as comparable to $10. When people enroll, they pay a $5 fee to be listed in the online directory and are issued two hours. Anacostia Hours has seventy members as of early January 2007, and about 140 hours are in circulation. The board is exploring other ways of increasing the number of hours if it sees indicators of pent-up demand for more. For example, current members earn two hours when they refer a new member. Another method that other hours programs have used is establishing a bank where people can buy hours using U.S. dollars.

    The group has cast a wide net to build diversity of goods and services into the program. Nick Williams, a board member who offers tree pruning and nonprofit consulting services, has used his Anacostia Hours to buy pies from Timmy’s Pieces of Peace bakery and a meal at the Artmosphere Cafe. “This is meant to foster person-to-person, face-to-face relationships, unlike many transactions in today’s commercial world. It provides a medium of exchange, as well as opportunities for neighbors to meet and get to know each other,” Williams says.

Ultimately, the founders would like local businesses to be able to include Anacostia Hours in workers’ salaries, and to pay their suppliers with them. Since this is only possible with local vendors, it creates incentives for sourcing locally, further stimulating the local economy and keeping the hours in the community.

    Fundamentally, money is just a convenient way of matching unmet needs with unused resources. So imagine Baltimore’s long list of needs matching up with its under-used resources. School children need tutoring and protection from bullying; older children need money for higher education; seniors need help with household tasks, trips to the doctor, or simple companionship; working parents need reliable child care; families need decent housing; local businesses need customer loyalty and access to low-cost micro loans; underemployed people need job skills; and everyone needs safety and affordable health care. What do we have in the resources column? Seniors and school-age children with time; middle-schoolers with energy; people with skills at all levels, from housekeeping to home repair to bookkeeping; sturdy housing stock (in need of renovation); locally owned businesses; and locally produced goods. The logical act of matching these needs and resources would foster connection in the neighborhoods of our city and inspire all of us to reconsider our definition of wealth.



—Julie Gabrielli wrote about microenterprise in Urbanite’s June 2006 issue. She is a Baltimore-based eco-architect and a change agent for a restorative economy.



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