Something is blossoming in our little town. Whilst ten years ago this was mainly a farming area, very rural and populated by country folk, now it's becoming the 'surf coast hinterland' and as people can't afford to live on the coast, more young people and families are moving in to enjoy the relaxed atmosphere and cheaper housing prices. It's exciting - with more new people comes new ideas and opportunity to start some pretty cool community projects, should anyone have the desire too.
On Saturday, after the garden project, I went and visited two friends of mine, which for the sake of this post, I'll call Sky and Tom (not their real names). They have two kids and a big block at the end of town, which they have a lovely food forest that's really becoming, fruit trees, and lots of ideas for how to get some alternative community abundance happening.
I love these two - I first met them when I popped over to pick up some plants he had advertised and ended up staying to chat about crypto, herbalism, oneness, depression, permaculture and lots more. He's a wonderful hippie, complete with wearing a sarong about town, which isn't the done thing around here. He makes me laugh with his warm, loving and crazy nature - this is a man with big ideas and crazy airiness that can be hard to ground. His wife is a bare footed earth mother with a strong sense of social justice. When you're with them, you feel embraced. They're the type of people you sit on the earth with, in the dirt with, drink herbal tea with.
Out the front of their property is a nature strip which offers free greens for anyone that's passing. I was delighted to learn this crop was my greens - coriander, lettuce, kale, amananth were all my gifted seedlings from the garden meet up we have once a month. It's a good example of how shared gardens work.
I was meant to do a community leadership program with Tom via the council, but I've been a bit anxious this month as I started work and couldn't take more on. I regret it - it sounds really good, and looks at cultural sensitivities, theories of community and so on. Never mind - Tom is keeping me up to speed.
The idea we are all thinking about is a community centre for workshops, a kitchen for garden produce, a barter/exchange system - a real living space where all are welcomed in an alternative to supermarkets and loneliness. It's idealistic, we know. For Tom and Sky, knowing where to put the space is a hard thing - it costs money to buy land and set something like that up, and hard work to get the council to donate things. Where do we even begin? They're building a geodome and a kitchen and a few tiny homes in their garden, but they need help - I dont have time with my job and my own garden to tend. But the dream is there.
The super way out thing we've been chatting about is how the community exchange system works.
Tom's idea is to create 'WIN' - that's the first few letters of our town name so it works - a kind of economic token that is gained for labour (such as helping prune fruit trees or building a porch) or for produce (a kilo of zucchinis, for example, could equal a certain amount of WIN). This would have to be kept in a kind of ledger, but also depreciate over time (this is Charles Eisenstein at work - hoarding is the FIAT way, creating further class divides, a rich list and more isolation) so that it's in their best interests to SPEND WIN. Win could then be used to 'buy' labour, or preserves made in the kitchen. Perhaps FIAT could be the second layer (rather than the WIN 'token' being so) so everything had two prices - eg 15 WIN for a jar of pickles might be 5 AUD. Any FIAT gained in the 'store' - whereever that might be and whatever form it might take - would be passed on to whoever was responsible for it's production.
Say 'Joan' contributes to a community kitchen day, making passata for three hours. The agreed labour could be 60 WIN, 20 WIN an hour. She makes three jars of passata, which are labelled with the communities logo and her name in small print, with the cost - 5 AUD/20 WIN, or perhaps even a combination: 10 WIN plus 2.50 AUD. The purchase is recorded in a ledger, and at the end of the month, 'Joan' recieves both AUD and WIN. The following month, she buys a jar of pickles from the co-op with her WIN, and volunteers some time weeding as she wants to save some WIN to get someone to come and prune her fruit trees.
The idea is to create a community exchange, but also give the option for people to also have some money in their pockets, and feel part of a community. It also suggests less dependency on mainstream currencies and gives those with less money the means to gain labour and produce and food in exchange for their own efforts rather than paying out of pocket with FIAT.
Now, we love the idea, but actually bringing it to fruition is really tricky. Would people recieve it well? How do people feel about money - is it so enmeshed in their thinking that 'selling' their labour for 'WIN' might sound like a rip off? What if at the end of the month someone wants to 'cash in' their WIN, or what if they move away?
Before anyone says 'why don't you use LOTUS' - I don't want technology to be a BARRIER to community. I want to embrace the older generation's knowledge base and there is NO WAY that they'll get their heads around crypto. We were thinking of a simple card where we wrote the IOU's or WIN amounts, like a passbook for the bank, or a shared EXCEL file or something and/or both. It feels fuzzy - no sooner do I embrace an idea in my head than it scuttles out of reach. Hence, why I'm asking the good folk of HIVE - the brains trust!
In Tom's mind, if this culture spread to other towns, there might be some kind of currency exchange that may work.
It's the kind of thing that can bring community together in a really innovative way.