Time Banks for Sustainability

"Building a strong, local communities" is an essential ingredient in every prescription for achieving a sustainable world, but how do you build a strong local community? Time Banks have been working on this problem for over ten years and there are now over 300 communities in 22 countries that are using this “pay it forward” system to weave tighter communities.

Time Banks provide an infrastructure for neighbors to get to know each other and an incentive system for neighbors to take care of each other. There is a web site where neighbors list the types of things they like to do for each other and a place to log the hours spent helping each other. For every hour you spend doing something for someone in your community, you earn one Time Dollar. Then you have a Time Dollar to spend on having someone do something for you. It's that simple. Yet it also has profound effects. It turns strangers into an extended family. We’re going to need to depend on our neighbors as extended family to live well in a world with shrinking natural resources.

Technological innovation alone can’t save us from our lemming-like drive towards decimating the Earth’s natural resources. We’ll need a cultural shift to rebalance our pleasure seeking away from global consumption lifestyles and towards less resource intensive local lifestyles. We’re going to have to substitute social capital for financial capital – more love, less stuff. We’ll never get to lower levels of consumption unless we find a way to make it more fun and fulfilling than the consumptive lifestyle. This is a tall order in our competitive, consumerist Yang culture. Yet The Inconvenient Truth remains, if we don’t limit our consumption we face catastrophic weather changes and ecological disasters. Only deep meaning-filled relationships within a strong local community could possibly pull us away from resource intensive lifestyles before it is too late.

Time Banks build strong local communities through a parallel Yin economy of people taking care of each other. The types of services offered are not the typical market services one gets paid for in the Yang economy. They are the mentoring, nurturing village services referred to in that phrase, “It takes a village to raise a child.” e.g. cooking, teaching, minding children and elders, gardening, light home repair, transportation, etc.

In the Time Bank economy everybody’s hours are given equal value. By the standard market economy rules this makes no sense. But Time Dollars have a different purpose than federal dollars. Federal dollars were created to allocate scare resources; Time Dollars were created to weave tighter communities. They are like frequent flier points for rewarding neighborly behavior.

To create a sustainable world, we need to change what people value. The most powerful way to change people’s values is by giving them a new experience and having that new experience reinforced by people are around them that they respect. Time Bank communities provide an experience of human interdependence that is not based on charity or money payments. We submit that this is the type of interdependence that will be integral to creating a sustainable culture.