What is a Community Currency?
Community Currency allows localities and regions to create real wealth in their
local economy by matching the unmet needs with the underutilized resources. It
also provides a way for the wealth that is produced locally to benefit local
people, rather than being siphoned off to distant companies. This workbook
takes you through four basic steps to evaluating, choosing, and implementing a
local community currency that improves your economy and builds local capacity.
These four basic steps are as follows:
1) Set Currency Objectives: Do an assessment of your community
where you identify the priorities for matching unmet needs with
underutilized resources – this will determine the objective of the
complementary currency project you want to implement.
2) Choose the Appropriate Currency: Review the different types of
complementary currencies that are available, and choose the type or types
that suit your needs best.
3) Recruit the Leadership Team: Build local support for the community
currency system, which means finding appropriate leadership and a group
of people who can help with the different aspects of the project.
4) Choose the Right Mechanisms: Establish a system for managing
transactions in your community, which includes considerations of the
support medium, standard of value, store of value, issuing procedures, and
cost recovery. This system can take many forms, depending on the local
resources available, the scale of the project, the type of participants, and
the type of currency you select.
5) Establish a Circulation System: Every community currency system
needs to carefully design the exchange process and circulation system so
that the money keeps moving throughout the community, and doesn’t
accumulate in ways that make people and business discouraged.
Complementary and Community Currencies
A complementary currency - the basis of the community currencies discussed
here - is an agreement to use something else than legal tender (i.e. national
money) as a medium of exchange, with the purpose to link unmet needs with
otherwise unused resources.1 Complementary currencies exist on many levels
and for many purposes - consider what has happened with frequent flyer miles
issued by the airline industry around the world. Initially, frequent flyer miles were
only a marketing gimmick for each individual airline; they could only be used to
purchase airline tickets of that specific airline.
By now, fourteen trillion airline miles have been issued by five global airline
alliances – more than all the dollars or Euros bills combined.2 They can be earned
without setting a foot in a plane (e.g. through the use of specific credit cards); and
they have become redeemable not only for air travel, but for car-rentals, long-
distance phone services, and an increasing range of products. Two thirds of all
British Airways miles are cashed in for something else than for purchasing an
airline ticket.
2
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