Creating Wealth Read online

  These raw statistics can’t help but break your heart. It is hard to read them without feeling a sense of despair and helplessness. Recognition of the systemic underlying causes of this national shame would be the starting point to correct it.

  A Scarcity of Care

  Several converging systemic patterns form the roots of the economic vice that squeezes our children and elders. The time crunch everyone experiences (caused by a competitive currency dominating our exchange system) is a key factor, combined with the low wages paid for jobs with skills we have in abundance, and the lack of value our system places on people who are not in the workforce.

  Child care and elder care takes time. It does not typically require years of study or apprenticeship, although higher skill levels in issues like nutrition, first aid and healthcare can make the difference between quality care and neglect. The main factor is time — young children and disabled elders can require someone’s focused attention 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In an economy where all able-bodied adults typically need to work full-time to earn enough dollars to pay for basic necessities, time is scarce.

  The skills and capacities we need to take care of each other are not scarce, however. Human beings are richly endowed with the capacity to love and nurture each other. It is arguably one of our innate survival skills — everyone knows how to do it, with the rare exception of people who are born with mental disabilities or illnesses that make them sociopaths on some level. In an ideal world, the knowledge and skills we would need to provide adequate nutrition and healthcare would be something we learned as we matured, since these would have been provided to us by our parents and extended family.

  Yet in this current economic system all the caring functions, even those needed in abundance, are not valued adequately. In the case of child care and elder care, this translates into low wages for the people who are arguably carrying out some of the most important and sacred tasks in our lives. The low wages paid for these jobs mean that people who do the jobs are often living in poverty themselves.

  Time Banks and Care Banks

  When the effective delivery of an important service requires a substantial amount of time, the competitive, scarce exchange system will inevitably prove to be inadequate. The clichéd expression “time is money” states the problem pretty clearly — the more time something takes, the more it costs. If lots of time is required, then the costs will be substantial, and this grows in direct proportion to the level of skill involved.

  Raising children challenges even the most intelligent minds, and elder care can be equally confounding. When all we expect of our child-care and elder-care providers is the bare minimum — physical safety — we take the care from the equation. Providing “care” becomes merely a job, performed by low-skill, low-pay workers. When the world of a child or elder is allowed to fall into hands that don’t care and don’t know, that world shrinks, in danger of becoming an unbearable monotony, where humanity is forgotten and individual potential ignored.

  Parents face the hard reality of child care on a daily basis. It is a problem that has become more pressing in the last 50 years as opportunities for women in the professional workforce have expanded and the economy has made it harder and harder to raise children on a single income. Child care co-ops have emerged in larger cities, where groups of parents arrange their schedules around shared child care, and where parents themselves provide a lot of the service rather than relegating it to lower paid child-care workers. These baby-sitting co-ops can actually be considered as very small scale complementary currency systems, with typically one hour of baby-sitting as the unit of account. While a co-op is a nice alternative to much of what passes for child care, it doesn’t work for everyone. What other creative solutions can we find? After all, the need for child care is not going to go away. We need to turn again to our children as an important center of our purpose here, and stop relegating them to the sidelines.

  One way to meet our child-care needs, and a lot of other needs as well, is to turn to a Time Bank — a system which allows people to exchange time without using dollars or other forms of national currency.5 Time Banks work like this: people sign up as members, listing the services they are willing to perform and the services they want to receive. Time dollars are exchanged, based on the amount of time spent on the service, not on the level of skill or perceived economic value. All time is valued the same — an hour for an hour. In a Time Bank system, time is the great equalizer because each of us only has 24 hours in a day. In this system, it is considered that all time has the same value.

  Time Banks can be used in many situations and on various scales. A shared living facility might record time dollars on a chalk board, while a city might track time and requests electronically, matching people up using a database. A new county level Time Bank was recently formed in Wisconsin that will coordinate services throughout a region. Time Banks can serve a relatively narrow purpose, as they do in Washington, DC, where Time Banks are used in the juvenile justice system to motivate young people to get out of trouble and learn job skills, or they can serve many different goals, as in Portland, Maine, and Montpelier, Vermont, where Time Banks encourage community building, economic development, poverty alleviation and even health service provision.

  The core values of Time Banking grew out of the anti-poverty work done in the 1960s by the founder of the movement, Edgar Cahn. Frustrated by a War on Poverty that reinforced poverty by creating classes of beneficiaries and benefactors, Edgar felt it was important to affirm the value and dignity of every human being, regardless of their economic value to the system. This conviction led to the five core principles that are part of every Time Bank.

  PRINCIPLES OF TIME BANKING

  Assets

  We are all assets.

  Every human being has something to contribute.

  Redefining Work

  Some work is beyond price.

  Work has to be redefined to value whatever it takes to raise healthy children, build strong families, revitalize neighborhoods, make democracy work, advance social justice, make the planet sustainable. That kind of work needs to be honored, recorded and rewarded.

  Reciprocity

  Helping works better as a two-way street.

  The question: “How can I help you?” needs to change so we ask: “How can we help each other build the world we both will live in?”

  Social Networks

  We need each other.

  Networks are stronger than individuals. People helping each other reweave communities of support, strength & trust. Community is built upon sinking roots, building trust, creating networks. Special relationships are built on commitment.

  Respect

  Every human being matters.

  Respect underlies freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and everything we value. Respect supplies the heart and soul of democracy. When respect is denied to anyone, we all are injured. We must respect where people are in the moment, not where we hope they will be at some future point.6

  While they are not focused on child care or elder care, Time Banks provide a system where care for children and elders can take place more easily. In fact, a high percentage of Time Banks find that child care is one of the things people are seeking when they join. The fact that the activities in Time Banks are officially tax-exempt (which means they do not count toward members’ income) also means that when people use services through a Time Bank, they do not put income-based government benefits at risk.

  In 2009, the concept of Time Banking was taken a step further, so that it could be used reliably for elder care. Through a grant from the Ashoka Foundation and the US Administration on Aging’s Community Innovations for Aging in Place (CIAIP) program, the idea of a Care Bank was born.7 A Care Bank adds an additional level of coordination and reliability to the Time Bank model. If a Time Bank is like a marketplace, where people enter their offers and requests and trade them as often as they like, a Care Bank is more like an insurance program. Members
of a Care Bank make a commitment of time and money to the system each month, and in return they are able to receive care when they or their family needs it.

  Montpelier, the capital city of Vermont, has created both a Time Bank and a Care Bank. The Onion River Exchange is a standard Time Bank, where members post their offers and requests and trade with each other as often as they like. The city also received a federal grant from the US Administration on Aging to create the Rural Elder Assistance for Care and Health (REACH) program. REACH expands traditional Time Bank membership types to include three levels: basic, assisted and specialized.

  At the basic level, REACH works like a Time Bank. You make a donation to the organization of either $25/year or offer two hours of assistance with a fundraiser for the organization. Then you post the things you are willing to do for the Time Bank — your offers — and the things you would like someone to do for you — your requests. The posting is made using the Community Weaver software developed by Time Banks USA. A central website keeps track of all the members, their requests, their offers and the time dollars or, in Montpelier’s case the Community Credits, that are exchanged by members.

  At the assisted level, you make a commitment of time and money each month — four hours of time and $5 per month for each service cluster you need. So if you want to have your sidewalk and driveway shoveled in winter, you would sign up to be part of the Yard Work cluster. Your four hours of time could go to doing something else that was needed by Care Bank members — perhaps you could call a neighbor who needs reminding about the medications he or she is taking on a daily basis. And the Care Bank coordinator would make sure that someone was available to shovel your walk when needed.

  At the specialized level, you make a higher commitment of time and money each month — eight hours of time and $15 per month for each service cluster you need. This level helps members have access to preventive care services and more highly specialized skills, like those of electricians and carpenters. The preventive services include things like massage therapy, chiropractic care, exercise and yoga classes, herbal therapy and other alternative and complementary healthcare services. The access to these services attracts a broad spectrum of the community to the system and provides the Care Bank with a solid foundation of people’s time to continue to offer the assisted level of care to others.

  The Japanese System

  The Care Bank model shares a lot in common with the time exchange systems that have been in existence in Japan for over 15 years. The Japanese population is the second fastest aging population in the world. There are already 800,000 retired people needing daily help and another one million who have disabilities. The Japanese Ministry of Health forecasts a vast increase in these numbers in the foreseeable future.8

  In order to address this rapidly rising problem, the Japanese have implemented several new time exchange currencies.9 In these systems, the hours that a volunteer spends helping older or handicapped persons with their daily routine are credited to that volunteer’s time account. Time accounts are managed like a savings account, except that the unit of account is hours of service instead of Yen. Time account credits are also available to complement normal health insurance programs. One of these time exchange systems is run on a national level by the Sawayaka Foundation in Japan. It’s called the Fureai Kippu system and has a lot to teach us about how complementary currencies can address serious social issues.

  In the Fureai Kippu system, different values apply to different kinds of tasks. For instance, a meal served between 9 am and 5 pm can have a lower credit value than those served outside that time slot because they don’t conflict with family dinners. Household chores and shopping have a lower credit value than personal body care.

  These healthcare credits are guaranteed to be available to the volunteers themselves, or to someone else of their choice, within or outside of the family, whenever they may need similar help. Two electronic clearing houses ensure that if someone can provide help in Tokyo, the time credits become available to his or her parents anywhere else in the country. Many people just volunteer the work and hope they will never need it. Others not only volunteer, but also give their time credits away to people who they think need them. In these cases, it amounts to doubling their gifts of time: for every credit hour of service, the amount of care provided to society is two hours.

  Most significantly, this type of service is also preferred by the elderly participants themselves because the caring quality of the service turns out to be higher than those obtained from Yen-paid social service workers. The meaning of Fureai Kippu (Caring Relationship Ticket) spells out its agenda. The system also provides a more comfortable emotional space for elders, who would otherwise be embarrassed to ask for free services.

  The Japanese also report a significant increase in volunteer help, even by people who do not bother to open their own time accounts. The reason may be that in a community where this system is operational, volunteering is simply more acknowledged. The same effects were found in a US study by the University of Maryland Center of Aging.10 These findings should put to rest concerns that paying volunteers with complementary currency might inhibit those not getting paid from volunteering.

  As of end 2005 there were over 487 municipal level healthcare, time-credit systems in Japan, most run by private initiatives such as the Sawayaka Welfare Institute, the Wac Ac (Wonderful Aging Club, Active Club) and the Japan Care System (a nonprofit with some governmental funding). They range in size from a few families and small organizations of up to 50 people to large, nationwide programs that are run by labor unions. One estimate of the level of transactions that take place with this type of complementary currency stated:

  As for the number of participants in each community currency system, the groups with ‘less than 50 members’ and ‘50 to 100 members’ account for 60 percent of the total, indicating that small-scale systems are widely recognized in Japan. As for the extent of circulation of community currency related goods, circulation within the municipality accounts for about half of all transactions.11

  If we in North America could build these caring, relational transactions so that they amounted to a higher percentage of the exchanges we made each day, this would certainly start to balance the effects of the competitive currency in our economy and our lives. In Bali, a very different society has emerged with about of an adult Balinese’s time spent in the cooperative economy. The same social change — one that captures ancient values like honoring elders and treasuring children while embracing a new level of consciousness to extend our idea of connectedness to the whole human and sentient family — is possible in our time.

  CHAPTER 12

  Eating Money

  Food for all is a necessity. Food should not be a merchandise,

  to be bought and sold as jewels are bought and sold by those

  who have the money to buy. Food is a human necessity,

  like water and air, it should be available.

  PEARL BUCK

  A Shared Meal

  Among the !Kung people of Botswana, a successful hunt used to mean a shared community meal. When one family got a large kill, the expectation was that they would share it with the rest of the people in their circle of homes, which were arranged around a common central hearth, with the doors facing towards the center. Archeological research has revealed that this camp layout has been unchanged for over 10,000 years, earning the !Kungs the title of the most conservative people on Earth.

  Because the !Kung maintained their traditional hunter-gatherer way of life until late in the 20th century, anthropologists were able to study them in depth and document what happened when this traditional culture was exposed to “modern” life. (This process inspired a popular movie called The Gods Must Be Crazy.) Before modern society arrived on their doorstep, even family living space was visible from the circle of homes through open doors. Everyone could see what everyone else was doing.

  In the 1970s and 1980s, the government of Botswana started pro
moting trade among the villages in the Kalahari, and for the first time, money was introduced to the !Kung. This seemingly small change — the introduction of money — had an enormous impact on !Kung society and their social interactions. They began to use money to buy glass beads and other valuables, which they locked in new metal boxes in their homes. Within five years, people sought privacy rather than intimacy, and even the way they laid out their homes changed. No longer were doors open towards a common hearth; instead they faced away from the circle of homes. People started hoarding instead of depending on others, and the hunter-gatherer way of life that had shaped !Kung society over hundreds of generations gave way to totally different life patterns much closer to our own.1

  This true story illustrates one of the links between the monetary exchange system we use, the economics of food and trade and the social practices that are shaped by both of them. In one culture, sharing is the norm; in another, hoarding is the norm. A way of life can be transformed and/or intentionally molded by the introduction of a new socially-constructed policy, program or monetary instrument.