This is a CTP of initiative: Shareable‐ ShareBloomington (USA)
This CTP (CTP4) consist of the formalization of Timebank in ShareBloomington in October 2015.
Timebank is a formalized concept of time exchanges through an online platform by providing services, without financial transaction. The egalitarian nature of the system ensures that people will be able to purchase the services that they need without toiling endlessly for high priced services like in the market economy. People can also trade goods with the stipulation that their price will be based on the amount of time involved in producing the goods and not on their market value.
For more information see: http://www.shareable.net/blog/how-to-share-time-through-timebanking
Through Timebanking, Shareable helps to create matches between people who need things and others who can help in meeting those needs: they keep track of completed transactions in the system.
Timebank was totally new to Ryan and his other colleagues at ShareBloomington. He tells about it with much excitement:
“Timebank added another large dynamic piece to the sharing culture and sharing economy at Bloomington. Because we never had the TimeBank here before. We experimented in local currencies and we never did to hard banking. So, that was just one more piece of momentum you know, it (ShareBloomington) just kept growing”.
As Andrea Explains, the platform looks like a Facebook page, where you have your own profile and where you can make a list of all the things you need. “So you can say: I regularly need somebody to help me with cleaning, or I regularly need somebody to help me and clean my gutters. And then you also list things that you offer. For example, I am good at cooking, or I can teach, or I have a truck and I can give you a ride for anything. And so, people just make these lists, and then you can go in as a user and once you have an account you can go in and you can see everything that is listed”. And you just say: I am interested in your service, can we meet?”
According to Andrea it is important to be exact about what you need from the person you are going to do an exchange with. Andrea also emphasizes that they ask people not to exchange goods in the form of money: “The moment that you are doing that conversion from time to money, you are kind of breaking the system that we want, which is completely parallel from the capitalist market.”
This CTP is co-produced by a person named Teddie Mower, who Ryan had met through Facebook. Teddie organizes many things in the Sharable zone of Louisville, and is also one of the organizers of the Louisville TimeBank. She works at the Indiana University in Bloomington and lives half of the time in Bloomington and half of the time in Louisville, Kentucky.
“TimeBanks started, just basically out of a conversation, so, I was looking at a friends post on Facebook and some comments on that and the referenced *Elinor Ostrom, and I was very curious and so asked this person: Did you know Ostrom, did you work with her? And we got into a conversation. And we started talking about different modes, applied, community oriented economy and so she brought up that she helped start the Louisville TimeBank, which is one of the largest TimeBanks in the US. And you know, so, she was going to spend more time in Bloomington and she asked me and my fiancé if we would be interested in helping her start a TimeBank here?”(Ryan)
After their conversation online, Teddie and Ryan met in person to talk about the start of a TimeBank in Bloomington. According to Ryan her offer to help with the Timebank was right on time: “I had been asked to do this ShareFest, we already gotten this tools when my friend died, we had already like institutionalized ShareBloomington as an institutional shell, and so then the TimeBank just kind of fitted with that.”
Ryan and Andrea both got really excited about the idea and hosted the first TimeBank orientation at Ryan’s house. Around twelve people came to the orientation event, while Teddie gave a presentation about TimeBank in general and about how the infrastructure of the TimeBank works.
“Teddie was the one that helped us formalize the Timebank, because Ryan and I were already thinking about it. We just had no idea how to start. And Teddie was the one that had experience already, so she was the one that knew how we could get the software and she was the one that explained to us that we had to have orientation and that we had to do things in certain ways. That was definitely a big help. We probably would have pulled it up anyway, but it would have been much harder." (Andrea)
As it becomes clear from the quotes, Teddie Mower had an important role in the formalization of Timebank in ShareBloomington.
* Elinor Ostrom is an American political economist whose work was associated with the New Institutional Economics and the resurgence of political economy.
The most important event that is related to the formalization of the Timebank within ShareBloomington is the emergence of TimeBank in the United States in general. During the last two great depressions in the United Sates, hundreds of thousands (possibly millions) of people organized to meet their basic needs when the mainstream economy and centralized monetary system failed them. Timebanks in the US and a few other countries were developed by activist lawyer Edgar Cahn as a way to help the underprivileged and underserved help each other through time exchange instead of money exchange.
For more information see: http://www.shareable.net/blog/how-to-share-time-through-timebanking
Andrea explains it as follows: “TimeBanks actually originally started in the US as a way to keep senior people out of having to go to elderly homes. Because homes for seniors are really expensive. And so, it is a project that the government in Florida started. They started these TimeBanks in order to get senior people to collaborate more with each other so that they could be autonomous and stay in their houses for a longer period instead of having to go to a senior home.”
Also Ryan’s professor, who came up with the idea (and money from the university budget) to throw a ShareFest in Bloomington (see CTP 1), had inspired Ryan (and Andrea) to make Timebanking more official in Bloomington than it was before. As Andrea explains, “This professor of Ryan, who works with the aging population in Bloomington is very interested in these concepts. So, he is a big supporter of the TimeBank as well.”
Thus, this CTP consist of a ‘macro-event’ that is related to the formalization of Timebank in Bloomington, which is the overall emergence of the concept Timebanking in the United States, and a ‘micro-event’, which is the professor of Ryan who inspired him to start a TimeBank in Bloomington.
This CTP consist of two contestations, which are totally unrelated.
Timebanking in Bloomington has been growing really slowly since the start-off. As Ryan states: “We are kind of waiting for a positive critical turning point for the TimeBank (Ryan).” Because of the slow growth, ShareBloomington does not have a high volume of exchanges, which makes it a bit of a challenge to mature and the concept in Bloomington.
The first challenge is getting people (especially the elderly) confortable with the concept: “You know a big challenge is to explain to concept and it is getting people comfortable with the interface. Because the interface is digital and you know there is variety in ages and levels of economic access. They don't always have consistent access to computer and internet.” (Ryan)
“Timebanking is not growing super-fast, and the reason for that is that it is hard to get people to understand the concept, because it takes a lot of computer-work..”(Andrea)
The second challenge, regarding the growth of Timebanking in Bloomington is that the town has a small and vibrant community, where most people put a lot of time in volunteering for projects, being involved in their neighbourhoods, being involved in their faith-communities and/or being involved in their university community. This also means that people find it hard to make even more time available to participate in the TimeBank. According to Ryan, the communities is so tightly connected, or densely connected that people already informally provide services for each other and informally make exchanges: “Now, we make the argument that the TimeBank is a way of making those relationships more smooth. For example like we have a neighbour who is a good friend of ours that when we have to go into town, we give her a key to the house and she watches our cat and she will watch our rabbit. And when she goes out of town, we will go and watch her cats. But the difference is that, so for example, like we had to go out of town for one weekend and that was fine, she was fine coming over and watching the cat and the rabbit. But we had to go out of town again the very next weekend and so having to ask that favourite twice in a row, can kind of strain our relationship, strain that goodwill. But since we have the TimeBank, we'll compensate you with a time-credit, so you can ask somebody to come work in your garden for an hour. And so that makes sense. It evens out social reciprocity across a large network instead of keeping it one to one. So that is my argument, but you know people are already exchanging things informally so much, and it is hard for many people to see the direct utility of having a TimeBank system.” (Ryan)
The latter mentioned contestation point is purely based on contestation within the concept of Timebanking in Bloomington. Obviously, there is nothing wrong with being part of a connected community and exchanging time without an official system such as Timebanking.
As mentioned before in the section content, the formalization of Timebank in Bloomington was totally anticipated; Ryan and Teddie organized an orientation event together to make the concept of Timebanking familiar to interested people, and to explain what the advantages of Timebanking are compared to informal time exchange.
However, It was not anticipated that explaining the concept and getting it known among groups, and especially making people feel comfortable with Timebanking through a formal platform would require a lot of time investing. As Ryan explains: “The big challenge is to explain the concept and it is getting people comfortable with the interface. Because the interface is digital and there is a variety in ages and levels of economic access. They don't always have consistent access to computer and internet.”
Also, Teddie got a new job, right when ShareBloomington started the TimeBank. Hence, she has been very busy and has not been participating as much as Ryan and Andrea had expected. As Ryan and Andrea were busy with the tool library, they had counted on Teddie for the further progress of the Timebank in Bloomington.
“I actually thought it would grow a little bit faster in Bloomington, but I think I also did not know that we were going to be so busy with the tool share (..) I also thought Teddie would help a little bit more. So again, it fell on Ryan and me.” (Andrea)
In conclusion, the formalization of the TimeBank in ShareBloomington was anticipated, but it was not foreseen that it would require such a considerable and consistent time-investment to make growth of the use of the TimeBank happen and get new people familiar and comfortable with the concept.
The learning that came out of this CTP is the realization that more time investment is needed for the improvement and increase of Timebanking in Bloomington. The most important time investment according to Andrea is the planning of orientation days. This includes getting to know the people who want to be a part of the Timebanking system.
“It takes a lot of computer-work. We have software and we have to administrate it, and I have to make sure that things are working properly and so, on top of that we don't have time to organize orientations very often. And one of the requirements to sign up for a TimeBank is to go to an orientation, so that is part of the reason why it has not grown very fast.” (Andrea)
Strictly speaking, people can only become part of the Timebank system if they are ‘checked’ by someone who is active at Shareable. According to Andrea this is important, because people are actually spending time together and at each other's houses.
Moreover, Ryan and Andrea just recently started to train other people to do the orientations instead. These include mainly people who they trust and who are already a part of Timebank Bloomington.
Furthermore, ShareBloomington is trying to access existing, pre-structured, micro-communities within Bloomington such as faith-based communities and neighbourhood communities, and to see if they would be interested in having orientations and such. As Ryan states: “We are hoping that once we access the neighbourhood communities and the faith-communities, that maybe the notion of the TimeBank will propagate through them. And so we will build a bigger network and networks so to speak.”
Ryan and Andrea are hopeful that this strategy will work in order to increase the use of Timebank. Andrea expresses this with much excitement:
“The people who are in it are using it a lot. I mean, it is just amazing because we have lawyers, we have I think two lawyers, we have people who do massage, we have a nurse, we have a lot of people who have trade-skills, or people who can do programming. We have somebody who is a web-programmer and he has been helping everybody to get their websites.” (Andrea)
In conclusion, the Timebank is a successful concept in Bloomington, regarding its functioning. It just needs more popularity among people in town.
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