Setting Objectives for the Community Currency
Evaluating Community Currencies to Meet Your Needs
There are a wide variety of unmet needs:
• Social needs such as elderly care or youth mentoring;
• Economic needs like unemployment and underemployment,
• Commercial needs like helping the locally owned businesses to better compete
against the supermarket chains and big box stores;
• Ecological, cultural, educational or regional identity activities;
• Supporting local non-profit organizations and community projects.
Only our imaginations are the limit of what can be done with complementary currency
designs.
Similarly, underutilized resources can be found in the most unexpected places:
• Obviously, any unemployed person who is willing and able to do something has some
unused capacities.
• The next time you go to your neighborhood restaurant or movie house, count the
tables and chairs that are empty: these are all unused resources that could be
mobilized for your purposes. Schools or other buildings that are empty during part of
the day, week or the year;
• Empty chairs in college, university or vocational courses;
• Youth organizations and other non-profits that have people ready to do things if
supplies are provided.
The idea is to design complementary currencies that are backed by or redeemable in
some of those underutilized resources, and can be mobilized to meet the unmet needs on
which one wishes to focus.
Economists will correctly point out that matching needs and resources is the function of
the market, even without complementary currencies. And if by the agency of some
magic wand all humans on the planet suddenly had an optimal distribution of money, one
could even imagine that there wouldn’t be any unmet needs.
The reality is clearly different. Therefore, the starting point for complementary
currencies is to meet needs that remain unfulfilled after transactions facilitated with
conventional money available to the community have taken place. Similarly, the unused
resources are those that haven’t been used in economic transactions mediated by
conventional money.
The economics of frequent flyer miles illustrates how this process works even in strictly
commercial environments. A well managed frequent flyer mile system is the one that
obtains something (customer loyalty) at the cost of an unused resource (an airline chair
that would be otherwise remain empty). We are simply extrapolating these same
concepts to a broader environment, and where the benefits would be those chosen by the
participants themselves in the regional systems.
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