Time Banking

Description

"Time banks, a mechanism that relies on mutual collaboration to promote sustainability and cohesiveness in communities, can leverage the use of new communication tools to lead deprived communities towards prosperity and heal the gaping omissions in public services.

Time banks effectively use people’s time and talents as currency for exchanges of value. It's been effectively used across the world to tackle explicit local issues, such as childcare provision or urban regeneration. It's also been used to reach those from socially excluded groups who have unmet needs, such as minority groups, single parents, and the unemployed. Time banks have been successful in delivering small but important local results because they excel at building networks of reciprocal social relations, trust, civic participation and community solidarity.

Time banks rely on directories of activities and participants to track the variety and availability of services offered. Often, knowing in advance when we will have free time to spare is difficult to anticipate.

Time banks have traditionally focused on involving participants from marginalized communities to help themselves. Today, with an online community eager to get involved, and with the emergence of tools that facilitate collaboration, time banks shouldn’t limit their sourcing to local resources, but instead take advantage of the "global brain" (in projects that would benefit from this type of input) to solve community problems and improve social cohesiveness. Time banks complemented by effective communication tools offer a great model to bridge local community participation with external resources, creating strong local communities that branch outward." (http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007147.html)

More Information

1. Time Dollars, see also at http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?id=895
2. Details on the Time Dollars organization at Time Banks
3. Very clear video explanation by the founder of Time Banks: Edgar Cahn on Time Banking [1]