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Danielle Batist is an experienced freelance journalist, founder of Journopreneur and co-founder of the Constructive Journalism Project. She lived and worked all around the globe and covered global and local stories of poverty, exclusion and injustice. Increasingly, she moved beyond ‘problem-reporting’ to include stories about the solutions she found. She witnessed the birth of the new nation of South Sudan and interviewed the Dalai Lama. She reported for Al Jazeera, BBC and the Guardian and regularly advises independent media organisations on innovation and sustainability. She loves bringing stories to the world and finding the appropriate platforms to do so. The transformation of traditional media fascinates rather than scares her. While both the medium and the message are changing, she believes the need for good storytelling remains.
Could Community Currencies Produce a More Sustainable Financial System?
Scrambling for cash at the local fishmongers the other day, I found two bank notes in my wallet. Although they were Pounds, they were of no use to me in London: they were Bristol Pounds. The notes were a souvenir from a reporting trip I’d done a few years ago to investigate how a community currency could enrich a local town or city in more ways than one.
When I read the news a few weeks ago that Liverpool will be the next UK city to launch its own local currency, I started researching a bit more before finding this article. I like it because it takes the idea of community currencies a step further to include time.
The New Economics Foundation defines community currencies as “community-led, bottom-up exchange systems [that] stimulate more vibrant, equitable and sustainable economies locally.”
In that spirit, this short article highlights the work of organisations that use currency as a ‘payment’ method for time: “At their best they work by formally valuing things that the mainstream economy finds hard to understand. That might be the time and skill to care for someone; to cook; or to fix things.”
The article’s conclusion particularly resonated with me, as it invites us to completely rethink the way our economy works: “The really big prize will be to replicate some of what happens with money – so that, for example, we could pay some of our local taxes in time credits and get partly paid in them, too. If that were to happen we could start to see a very different kind of economy, more human and more relational.”
