Time Banks & System Change

Time Banking: a Tool for Igniting Social Change

Over the past decades, changes in our society have eroded the infrastructures of our families, neighborhoods and communities. Paid professionals are now doing the work that once was an integral part of family and community life. But it’s an open secret that despite all the efforts and money poured into social programs, the problems are becoming more pervasive, not less. Too often, and despite the best efforts of professionals, the prevailing approaches treat the symptoms, not the causes.

What are these changes? A brief and by no means all-inclusive overview follows:

• The monetary economy only pays for and rewards the specialized skills that can produce the goods and services it needs.
  Result: Certain kinds of work—rearing healthy children, preserving families, making neighborhoods safe and vibrant, caring for the frail and vulnerable, redressing injustice, enriching our culture, saving the environment—are not recognized, valued and rewarded as “real” work. People who invest their time in these areas, people who do not have money, and people who are perceived as lacking marketable skills are often rejected or discarded.
• More and more women have joined the work place out of necessity or personal choice and can no longer care for their children at home.
  Result: Latch key children don’t get the attention and nurturing they need to grow into responsible adults.
• Our elders have gained increased financial independence through Social Security and their children are more mobile.
  Result: Elders are increasingly disconnected from their families and elder care costs are sky rocketing as paid professionals take on more and more of the caretaking that families used to do.
• Economic necessity forces families and individuals to find jobs wherever and whenever they can.
  Result: Marginalized groups—immigrants, minorities, those who have had fewer educational opportunities—are often left to cope on their own. The elderly and disabled are left alone and isolated.

 

Time Banking is not meant to replace the valuable and essential services of paid, social service professionals, but it does create an infrastructure that helps them achieve better results.

Time Banks build grassroots, community-based social networks that value and reward the contributions of individuals who are working together with professional social service agencies to eliminate the sources of social injustice and inequity.

Time Banks enlist the people and communities we are trying to help as partners and co-workers through a framework we call Co-Production.