On the road for/towards Time For The World

Time For The World, soon coming to a community near you!

In August, on the way to and from the TimeBankingUSA conference in Providence, RI, we had Stephanie Rearick and Leander Bindewald visiting and connecting timebanking and community currency projects in several location along the route.

In Philadelphia, Detroit and Toronto we connected the dots with representatives of community building initiatives to map out routes of co-learning and collaboration in the their respective locations. Each of these existing and newly inspired projects constitute part of the rich network of local experimentation and implementations that we want to curate and activate with our first TimeFTW learning platform, called Build For The World (for details and how it will work, see our latest TimeFTW project-description).

At the end of  September and all of October, Stephanie and Leander will be on the road again, giving presentations, convening timebanking meetings and trainings all over the USA. Not all meetings are confirmed yet, but if you live “en route” get in touch to get the latest updates or ask for a meet-up:

September:

23th:  St. Louis. MO  (Grace Hill)

25th: New Orleans, LA  (Other Worlds)

28th: Austin, TX

30th: Tucson, AZ

October:

1st-5th: Los Angeles, CA (amongst others:  Conference of California Federation of Timebanks )

6th: San Francisco, CA

9th: Seattle, WA

10th: Portland, OR  (Electrogals Frestival)

11-12th: Boise, ID (Lacey Sinn)

13th: Boulder, CO

14th: Des Moines, IA

15th: Iowa City, IA

17th:  Chicago, IL

18th: Toledo, OH (Toledo Grows)

20-23th: NYC (Contact Conference and MetaCurrency Collabathon)

24th: Madison, ME

25-27th: Ontario (possibly Montreal, Toronto, London, tba)

28-29th: Detroit, MI (TimeBanking Training and Confab)

On well sounding parallel note: during the same trip Stephanie Rearick will launch her new solo album in many locations along the way, see her music-website for the dates.


Time For the World proposal version 2

Our most recent funding proposal offers the current best expression of our direction and goals for the Time For the World project. We want to share it with you to let you know what all we’re up to and for help and outreach as we seek out the resources that can help us complete it. Please take a look,  tell us what you think, and pass it around. We can’t do this without you.

Thanks.

https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1gUUdwijG1I7RuDXNIAEzHnGcQyvMXB5iiXPtf8A5cu4


TimeBanking recognized as public safety resource

This article on Dane County TimeBank’s (our home timebank and fiscal sponsor) Youth Court demonstrates how timebanking’s pooling of resources and catalyzing and rewarding exchange can rebuild the community capacities that really help our kids in the long run.

http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/education/local_schools/article_6de914bc-9236-11e0-86a6-001cc4c03286.html


TimeBanks USA Conference coming up! Great opportunity for connecting.

Hello

More on this later but the TimeBanks USA Conference is starting to take shape and promises many ways to connect with people working on similar efforts. We’ll (TimeBanks USA – I say ‘we’ as a Board member and interim Co-Director) be rolling out our new open source Community Weaver 2.0 software and the Action Hub set of online learning tools, which will feature some active affinity groups working on juvenile justice, health/wellness, and family support. Plus much more that you can help create!

There’s currently a call for proposals for workshops so please share your ideas. We hope and plan to have the whole Time For The World team there and will be making plans – with anyone who wants to participate – for starting project-based experiments (Build For The World) in diverse communities, working more toward the International Timebanking Alliance, and more. Your participation is more than welcome!

http://tbusaconference.org

Hope to see you in August.


Very exciting meeting yesterday. We are ready to rock.

Yesterday the Time For The World skeleton crew hosted a meeting with Dane County, Wisconsin (Madison) based officials including Madison Municipal Judge and County Executive, journalists, organizers, tech professionals, cooperative movement organizers and experts, University staff and faculty and other inspiring individuals. Edgar Cahn, founder of timebanking and Founder and Chair of TimeBanks USA, was a special guest.

Many inspiring ideas came from this meeting and we will be following up on collaborative projects with many of the participants.

Our goal is to build a better way to build a better world, then catalyze the collaboration needed to make it reality. We intend to scale our efforts in Dane County way up while actively sharing information with other communities undertaking similar projects in areas around the world. We’re terribly excited and hope you are too.

Please join us if you like. We’ll be publishing a lot more as we get time in the coming weeks, including video from the meeting, notes, and a thorough description of and funding proposal for the Time For The World project.

In the meantime, read this article to learn more (thanks, Ruth Conniff!) We’re excited to be featured by The Progessive and plan to work with and for people of all political, social and economic stripes. That’s what inspires us about timebanking – it cuts across all these tired old dividing lines and connects us as humans. No losers in this game, that’s part of what makes it so much fun.


Deploying Time Banking for Human-Scaled Economic Development: Video

In February we gave a presentation at the International Conference on Community and Complementary Currencies in Lyon, France. Here is video and our slideshow from that presentation. Let us know what you think! We continue to build on and advance on this work as part of the project.

It is best viewed full screen.

http://vimeo.com/22087213


little update

I know we still haven’t shared on here much of what we learned or dreamed up during the Lyon and Tiocan gatherings. That’s because we have too much writing to do! Working on a new progress report and project vision implementation document which we’ll post here as soon as it’s ready. Stay tuned!

And sign up on the contact form if you want to be updated when something big happens, or better yet if you want to help make big things happen.


Connecting the dots in Madison, Wisconsin

Stephanie gave a speech at the International Women’s Day Rally at the Capitol protests in Madison, Wisconsin (home of Time For The World) on March 8, 2011. If we want an economy that works for people we need to address the mechanics of money itself. Mutual credit! Public banks!

Watch the video:

https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10150112255914667


Presentation from the International Conference on Community and Complementary Currencies

We are currently in Lyon for the International Conference on Community and Complementary Currencies. Here is our presentation. Let us know what you think. Please note, this is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Thank you.

https://docs.google.com/present/embed?id=dc8xp3ds_10c2r3k8cc&interval=60&size=l

Deploying_Time_Banking in pdf

Deploying_Time_Banking in ppt


Time for Lyon

Well the day has come – Stephanie and Marc are finally traveling to Lyon to present our paper at the Complementary Currencies conference, then to Tiocan to meet with other complementary currency folks to see what we can do together.


View Larger Map

First, Our intention in going to Lyon is to learn all we can about what’s currently happening with complementary currencies, what’s happened in the past, and how we can use that knowledge to create a better future.

Second, and why we’re making the trip – we see an urgent need to ensure that timebanking and its values-based inclusive properties be included in our economic future. We’re big fans of lots of models of complementary currencies, but also recognize that most continue to focus on the kinds of exchanges that normally happen in the marketplace. That may continue to exclude or inadequately meet the needs of the core economic functions of caregiving, creativity and civic engagement. By joining forces with other complementary currency systems and actors, we can create something that is more effectively complementary – that makes room for all people in our economy and uses appropriate tools for appropriate exchanges.

For example, since caregiving is both abundant and widely needed, we want an abundant medium of exchange to facilitate needs being met. Timebanking is perfect for this. But storefront space in our downtown is scarce – so it stands to reason we would use a more competitive, price-based currency for conducting business activities in our cities to best allocate such a resource.

Third, we’re going to meet lots of people who have similar interests, with huge bases of knowledge that we haven’t yet learned of and lots of connections with others who share our goals.

After the main conference, there is a day for Complementary Currency actors and on this day we really expect to find some people to work with into the future, creating and maintaining an international learning community and identifying ways we can work together to create the systems and tools we need to succeed in creating a human-centered economy that values people and the planet.

Once the conference is over our work in Europe still continues…

Feb. 19 and 20 we’ll meet with more complementary currency actors near Geneva, in an action-oriented conference hosted by Matthew Slater of Community Forge. Once again we’ll have an even more in-depth opportunity to see what we have, what we need, and what we can do together to push our collective work out into the world.


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