This is a CTP of initiative: Spice (UK)
The Wales Institute for Community Currencies (WICC) was established in 2003. It was co-founded by the University of Wales, the charity Valley Kids and Timebanking UK (TBUK). WICC was created within the context of a short-term project to design, test and evaluate the scope for using community currencies to help disadvantaged and economically deprived communities in South Wales. The idea was to explore the role of community currencies in rebuilding lost community cohesion in the wake of deindustrialisation and to help communities to address their needs by mobilising own resources. Experimenting with time-based currencies was a major part of the remit.
Some modifications of time banking emerged through these WICC experiments. One modification involved a shift from the person-to-person service exchange model among members of a time bank to a model of time exchange that involves group activities organised by community organisations designed to address community needs these organisations identify and prioritise. Individuals devoting their time to group activities earn time credits according to their hours of contribution. The earned time credits, issued as credit notes, can be exchanged for access to events or services provided by the community organisations or donated by partner organisations. The partner organisations donate their spare capacities, such as unsold entrances to events, and thereby offer opportunities for individuals to spend time credits for access to events and services that otherwise they could only access through money payments.
The modifications address some limitations of conventional time banking. Conventional time banking supports community cohesion, but is organised around relations and service exchange between members of the time bank. Activities are driven by the offers and requests articulated at the level of individual members and these do not necessarily address community-level needs. The scope for exchanges within conventional time banks is limited to the complementarities between the needs and wants of its individual members and the capacities of individual members to meet these needs. This can limit the range of services open for exchange in a time bank and the scale of the tasks that can be addressed. Also, the quality of service in a conventional time bank may not be the same as that of a service bought and sold on a conventional market. Additionally, there are safeguarding challenges when individuals provide services to each other in a conventional time bank and accounting needs, since there needs to be a software system to record service exchanges and keep track of individuals’ time accounts.
By contrast, organising group activities enables individuals to pool their skills and efforts, enabling bigger tasks to be undertaken relating to community-level needs. Individuals’ contributions of time can also be recognised and incentivised through rewards provided by community and partner organisations. These take the form of entry to events or access to services that would otherwise only be accessible through payment. These ‘spending’ opportunities can be more powerful in incentivising community service than receiving a service from another time bank member. Also, as these are the same events and services that would otherwise be accessed by money payment they are of a market standard. There are fewer safeguarding concerns when people are working in groups and, as time credits are issued in the physical form of paper credits, there is no need for special accounting software.
This is not to say that the emergent new form of time exchange using credits has no downside. Rather, the different design involves some trade-offs. The element of reciprocity found in conventional time banking, which is an important mechanism in its potential for transformative change, is diluted in the Spice time credit model.
Nevertheless, with concern for needs of communities prioritised, the time credits model was found to resonate strongly with the traditions of Welsh communities to build institutions to enable community needs to be met using community resources. Wales is associated with a very strong sense of community solidarity borne, in part, from the shared experience of those living and working within isolated settlements and communities whose rationale and identity were bound up strongly with coal and the mining industry. Settlements and communities were there only because of coal and coal mining. For such communities, the local mine was likely to have been the only significant local source of employment and even those whose incomes did not come directly from mining were supported indirectly by mining activities. The nature of the work – hard, physical, low paid and often dangerous – also played a part, contributing to a strong shared sense of exploitation, hardship and risk. Communities needed to be strong and self-reliant.
The mine closures and de-industrialization toward the end of the 20th Century led to unemployment and depopulation, especially in the isolated and remote mining areas of the Welsh Valleys. Community cohesion was severely impacted and was further diminished by forces and trends both inside and outside Wales, such as economic globalization and migration. Many communities in the Welsh Valleys began to experience social problems alongside economic problems.
The purpose of introducing timebanking to Wales was to help rebuild communities, overcome divisions, improve interpersonal relationships within society, and improve economic and social opportunities. It was hoped that timebanking might provide alternatives to the self-reinforcing trends toward decline by offering new economic and social opportunities to those living in former mining regions of Wales.
The WICC investigated timebanking and its mechanisms as well as other community currency approaches. The project identified limitations as well as success factors in timebanking. The object was to design timebanking systems that would fit with the Welsh context and offer new ways of organizing people and activities in support of meeting community needs, thus enabling transformation of communities. A conventional (person-to-person) timebanking model was the starting point, but the WICC investigated design variations that might better fit the context and needs of former coalfield areas and communities. “What that meant in real terms was a shift in how we saw the currency behave. It started moving from a brokered exchange of skills between individuals to more of a purposeful engagement with broader communities through community anchor organizations.”
The success of the WICC action research project in Blaengarw marked a breakthrough. A new model of time exchange emerged based around groups of individuals working together on projects organised by social organisations and designed to meet community needs.
The WICC was set in up in cooperation with Timebanking UK (TBUK), Valley Kids and the University of Wales, Newport. It was backed financially for three years by the European Union Regional Development Fund. The funding provided for the involved organizations to investigate and experiment with different models and designs of timebanking.
TBUK is the umbrella organization for Time Banks across the UK. Founded by Martin Simon and David Boyle, the organization was established as a membership and support organisation for Time Banks in the UK and to promote international cooperation and information sharing with US and other national membership organisations involved in developing and promoting timebanking.
Valleys Kids is a charity operating in the Welsh Valleys to address challenges faced by young people. The Welsh Valleys rank among the areas most affected by unemployment, poverty and poor state of health. The charity focuses on children and their families by providing spaces, facilities and supports for young people and their development, including youth clubs, community gyms, accredited training schemes, and international exchange programmes, and by offering family support to parents and families, such as parenting programmes.
The University of Wales, Newport, as an academic organization, supported and hosted the WICC and contributed to the theoretical and conceptual development of a ‘Welsh’ model of timebanking.
The development of timebanking in the UK was an important backdrop. Timebanking had been brought to the UK in 1998 and the first time banks in the UK, Fair Shares in Gloucester and the London time banks, were already establishing and the UK network of time banks was beginning to grow. There was interest at the time also in other community currencies, but in the UK context timebanking on conventional lines was attracting political and academic attention. By 2000, timebanking had achieved recognition as a distinct class of activity, neither paid work nor volunteering but ‘unpaid work’. This gave timebanking and time exchange systems a special fiscal and welfare benefits status, which exempted the activities from tax and allowed those receiving welfare benefits or job seekers allowances to engage in time banking without this affecting their benefit payments.
The mine closures, the de-industrialisation, the depopulation and the demographic changes of the Welsh Valleys are also significant, as these provide the context for social and economic deprivation and decline in the Welsh Valleys, the loss of community cohesion, and the emergence of social problems associated with community division in which the need for mechanisms to reverse the cycles of decline that had set in was recognised.
The establishment of EU Regional Development Funding and its availability through programmes of support to regional regeneration is also significant.
Events in Blaengarw, including the decision to establish and fund the Creative Development Trust, are important because these created the opportunity to experiment with adapted form of timebanking on a ‘person-to-agency’ earning basis. The Creation Development Trust was instrumental to further innovation, involving the development of a new way of spending time credits.
After WICC successfully completed its work of research, design, testing and evaluation of time based service exchange approaches and its funding ended its legacy was carried forward by the establishment, in 2008, of two legal identities: Time Banking Wales and Spice. The person-to-agency time credit model and the organisation established to develop and promote it both carry the name ‘Spice’. In contrast to the purist model of timebanking, which focuses on building interpersonal relationships, Spice offers a mechanism for incentivised volunteering. Spice has since become established in Wales and has extended its operations also to England. The Time Credits infrastructure is being developed, including the earning networks of social and community organisations and agencies and the spend networks of donor partners. Spice time credits are now an established form of community currency and Spice (as an organisation) develops and deploys time credits in community projects to incentivise and reward community service.
The establishment of the WICC was not contested. The emergence of Spice as an organisation and the extension of its activities to England have led to tensions with time banks that operate on the original model, since both often compete for limited funding in the same areas of operation, geographically and in terms of sectors. This owes in part to lack of clarity over the different purposes that the two models serve and their complementarity. Although there are overlaps, each operates on a different model and mechanism of change and prioritises change at different level of scales.
There was a clear need to address the economic and social situation in the Welsh Valley that was seen by government actors from the EU level to the local level. It was less clear how to respond to the challenges. It was felt that community currencies could play a role, but there was no ready-made or proven solution. Rather, the need was for innovation and experimentation. Financial resources were provided to set up a research institution for creating and investigating new mechanisms for addressing the local needs.
There was no certainty at the time of establishing WICC that the experiments would be successful. However, there was a clear intent to experiment with innovations and those introduced by WICC along with those developed in Blaengarw proved to be successful and generalizable. They were found to provide alternative and attractive ways for people to become active in addressing community using time credit schemes to organise, incentivise and reward positive contributions. Time credits provided the basis for building a secondary economy that could act as an alternative to the mainstream economy as a way to organise productive activity and to deliver positive social impact.
The WICC had the mandate also to learn from positive experiences and to seek transferable and generalizable lessons. The WICC project showed that timebanking and time credits schemes can reverse spirals of economic and social decline and initiate and support virtuous cycles. It was intended that any transferable learning of the project should be carried forward. This was achieved by establishing the two legacy organisations, Timebanking Wales and Spice.
The significant growth of Spice that has been achieved since and the extension of operations from Wales to England were planned and worked for, but the pace of progress was not anticipated. The context of the Big Society policy agenda and its being so receptive and conducive to Spice were also factors in the rate and scale of growth of Spice.
A major element of the work of WICC was to learn from the experiments with community currencies. The experiments in the Welsh Valleys were monitored and the design innovations to the timebanking model that were introduced and tested were analysed from theoretical and practical perspectives.
The financial support of the European Union for the experiments and the academic credentials of the University of Wales lent added weight and credibility. This paved the way for the lessons learned from Blaengarw and the model developed there to be extended to other locations in Wales and, later, also to England.
An important early lesson was the need to be able to demonstrate and communicate the growth in take-up of the mechanism and its social impact. Lessons were learned also about embedding the innovation into local institutions. These lessons have been important in developing and implementing the strategy used by Spice (the organisation) in the subsequent development and upscaling of Spice (the mechanism) and developing the infrastructure of partner organisations.
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