New technology and a recession are giving second life to an old-fashioned idea in New Haven: exchanging services without using money.
Organizers pitched a new “SHARE Haven Time Bank” at a meeting Saturday night at the First Unitarian Universalist Society on Whitney Avenue. Thirty people showed up for a glimpse of a more connected, more egalitarian way to live in New Haven — facilitated by the Internet, that technological wonder so often trashed by those who say it’s killing real, face-to-face community.
Simply put, it’s an exchange of services among a network of people, without dollars. The best-known such exchange is in Ithaca, N.Y. (Click here for more information on that.)
New Haveners tried to launch a similar time bank here in the 1990s but it fizzled. Judging from Saturday evening’s event, the new effort has fresh energy and some new tools behind it.
Liz Gersten (pictured), a member of the organizing team, offered an example of how the time bank would work.
Say she wants help digging a gardening bed, she said, and Hannah (pictured) agrees to help. Hannah earns one “time-dollar”. She can spend it on someone to take care of her dog. (“He’s kind of a handful,” she warns.) That person can take her time-dollar and get a carpenter to do some repairs for her.
The example went around the room until it got to a man who said he wanted advice on “buying a horse,” and no one in the room had that expertise.
“It’s time to expand the network,” Gersten said, laughing.
Time banking expands the idea of barter, which is an exchange between two people, to a whole community of people who can get and give services to or from any other member of the network.
“The beauty of it,” said Brenda Caldwell (pictured at the top of the story), the chief instigator of this newest incarnation of time-banking in New Haven, “is that everyone is equal.” In other words, the value of every member’s time-dollar is equal to every other member’s, regardless of one’s qualifications, educational pedigree or life experience.
SHARE in the group’s name stands for Self Help and Resource Exchange. The local group plans to join an organization serving time-banking groups around the country, which provides technical advice and encouragement. Caldwell said she hopes by summer to have 50 members, who will pay between $10 and $40 for an annual membership (and possibly consider a lower fee down to zero for those unable to pay). The dues would enable the group to buy the software to run the effort online, where each member would keep track of his/her hours.
Of the impact that working online could have, Caldwell said, “I think it’s important to the organizers because it kinds of runs itself. It’s not as labor-intensive as it would be if you were keeping track of it in a notebook, and have someone be the mediator between two people. This way, someone can contact someone who’s offered a particular service on-line and they can finalize the exchange on-line.”
Several at the meeting said New Haveners should think bigger than 50 members in the short term, based on a five-minute video they watched of an established time-banking system in Portland, Maine. Several hundred members there exchanged 8,000 hours in one recent year.
The bigger the membership, and the more diverse their backgrounds and skill sets are, the more likely each member is to get his or her needs met — maybe even find someone who knows about buying horses.
There are still unanswered questions, like how to count an exchange that’s measured not in an hour or two hours but in the completion of a task. There was also some discussion of trading service for material goods (e.g., physical labor for land), but the organizers leaned toward thinking that wasn’t quite kosher — though they did say that joining the network might facilitate someone meeting someone through whom such an exchange might be made.
Organizers passed out a time-bank assessment, listing dozens of services such as driving to appointments, massage, listening, child care, dog walking, computer consulting, teaching sports or a musical instrument, gardening, bartending, car (or bike) repair, editing, and I Ching readings. Participants were asked to circle “give” or “receive” for each item they would consider providing or receiving, and circling both if that was appropriate. The brainstorming exercise was to get people thinking about all the things they could do and all the things they might need.
They also passed out a membership form, asking which services one could give or wanted to receive, and requiring two personal references to testify to one’s character and ability to perform in the the areas claimed. A parent would obviously want assurances before having someone provide child care, and not just anyone could do an I Ching reading.
Caldwell said she’d like to get started by March. “We’ll be prodding people to start using it,” she said, explaining that the past is littered with well-meaning groups that never got off the ground because members were shy about requesting services.
For more information, email here.
Anyone care to make a wager on how long it will be before some government official figures out a way to tax the "time dollars"?