This is a CTP of initiative: Hour Exchange Portland (USA)
This CTP concerns the shift from there being a set of unconnected initiatives that had emerged spontaneously at grassroots level in the USA as informed responses to the ending of the ‘War on Poverty’ programme to these being drawn together, connected, formalised, and systematised to form the basis of a ‘fundable’ social innovation movement. A key initiative was the development of the service exchange by the women at Grace Hill Settlement, St. Louis and that being taken up and used as the basis for a wider programme of mutual-aid by the Grace Hill Community.
The key actor in translating the time credit initiatives into a fundable social innovation movement was Edgar Cahn. Although Cahn is often thought of as having ‘invented’ timebanking, history shows that timebanking was already practised in Japan from 1973 (and theorised there already since 1950) and a service exchange was operating at Grace Hill already in the 1970s. Cahn’s major contribution was more to forge a fundable movement around timebanking. This is a significant contribution in its own right. Cahn brought a strategic perspective and a strong capacity to organise, develop and communicate the timebanking concept, which was important for increasing the profile of the nascent concept of timebanking among legislators, funders and potential stakeholders and for the early diffusion and growth of the timebanking movement.
This CTP depicts a decisive point of the development of timebanking in the US and across the world, as the theorization and formalization of timebanking by Cahn in English language using the terminology of ‘time dollars’ contributed to a spread of time-based currencies throughout the US as well as to other world regions.
[It is to be borne in mind that Mizushima, the originator of timebanking, had earlier developed timebanking theory and had written and broadcast extensively in Japan about the benefits of time as a currency for some applications, but because she wrote and broadcast in Japanese her influence was for a long time limited to Japan. She nevertheless opened a time bank in the USA in 1982 among the Japanese-American community in Gardena, California, making hers not only the world’s first time bank and first national timebanking network, but also the world’s first international timebanking network.]
Cahn’s abilities as a strategist, academic, writer and speaker were important in creating a fundable movement. He collected and brought together key concepts and ideas from a range of different originators and sources. He framed and generalized the essential elements of timebanking as had been developed by the women of Grace Hill Settlement and had been taken up in the MORE program. He wrote influential books describing timebanking and emerging approaches for using time as a currency.
Many of the concepts and ideas brought together in his books were not his own. However, connecting and framing them as he did helped to forge coherent narratives around timebanking and theories of change around its potential for social impact. He incorporated, for example, Goodwin’s concept of ‘core’ economy, Ostrom’s ideas about co-production, and (like Mizushima and the Grace-Hill pioneers of timebanking) the values-basis of timebanking.
The books set out: contextualized narratives to explain the need for timebanking, its purposes, roles and rationales; the kinds of change and social impact that timebanking might contribute toward; and transformative ambitions for timebanking.
Without full insight into this history, timebanking organisations and their members in the West often tend to credit the invention of timebanking to Edgar Cahn rather than to Mizushima, but Cahn’s role has more been to theorise and conceptualise the concept of timebanking, brand it, develop it and spread it. For this, he also founded the Time Dollar Institute and later, in association with Dr. Richard Rockefeller, he co-founded TBUSA. For a period, TBUSA became the main membership and support organisation for US Time Banks.
Cahn’s books are widely acknowledged to have been powerful instruments in marketing and promoting timebanking worldwide. There is nevertheless some frustration felt in the timebanking movement that the contributions of the original pioneers of timebanking, Teruko Mizushima in Japan (who originally actually labelled her organisation a ‘bank’) and the women of the Grace Hill Settlement in the US (who labelled their program a service exchange), are not more widely acknowledged and referenced in the core literatures of timebanking.
Edgar Cahn played a significant role in the spread of timebanking, especially through encouraging the establishment of new Time Banks. However, the development of timebanking in the USA has not followed a continuous growth curve; rather growth of the movement has levelled off and the evolution of timebanking has been uneven with periods of downturn and decline as well as of growth. Linda Hogan refers to this pattern in terms of ‘multiple re-births of US timebanking’.
The failure to sustain continuous growth owes largely to the fact that most US Time Banks do not manage to sustain their activities beyond the initial period of start-up and that annual births of new Time Banks are often matched or exceeded by deaths of existing Time Banks. Around 70% of US time banks fail in their first three years. In seeking to grow the movement, more attention has been paid by its leaders to forming new Time Banks than has been paid to addressing the challenge of how to develop and implement business plans that will enable existing Time Banks to sustain.
A few US Time Banks have, nevertheless, sustained over a period exceeding 10 years, including Hour Exchange Portland (HEP).
One of the more impressive and long-lived Time Banks – now coming up to 20 years of operations – is operated as part of the Partners-in-Care activities of Barbara Huston. Her time bank is part of a broader independent initiative within a mission-led organization that makes use of several different tools.
Linda Hogan points out that: “forging a social innovation ‘movement’ involved ideas from lots of others”, which were brought in by Cahn to describe timebanking and to weave narratives around timebanking.
An important aspect is the role of women in the process of inventing and establishing timebanking. “Timebanking in the US was created by women, both in the ideas and in the practice. It is a true example of the kitchen cabinet policies with women discussing the problems they faced and coming up with solutions that worked. It was, effectively, a group of women who found each other, compared notes and set the basis for timebanking in the USA”. Their initial major concern was to find ways to support the elderly and the sick. “They saw this as a feminist issue, as most care fell to women. Care was their responsibility”.
The Grace Hill women pioneers had used the term ‘time points’. Edgar Cahn chose the term Time Dollars over the terms ‘time points’, ‘time credits’ or ‘service credits’ and he established an institute, called the Time Dollars Institute, to promote timebanking. Cahn’s first book about timebanking came out (in 1992) using the Time Dollar terminology. “Cahn asked permission of Grace Hill, in the mid-eighties, to rename the resource exchange program as a ‘time dollars’ programme. The guiding principles that the women had used for their resource exchange became ‘core values’”.
Important contributions to conceptual understanding were also made by Neva Goodwin and Elinor Omstrom, whose ideas Cahn took up in his book “No More Throw Away People”. Goodwin distinguished two different economies: the market (money) economy and what she terms the ‘core’ (time) economy. Both are needed to provide human welfare and wellbeing. Elinar Omstrom developed ideas around the concept of co-production.
The core economy constitutes activities that support family and community life and citizenship. It relies on the abundant resource of human labour in performing routine tasks of child care, elderly care, community support, etc. It emphasises belonging, caring, devotion and cooperation, which are sentiments and actions not motivated by money. The market economy by contrast carries out production under conditions of competition. It emphasises scarcity value, minimisation of money costs and making profit. Both economies are necessary for welfare delivery, but they each operate on different principles and values.
In his books, Cahn has argued that the market economy and its demands can (inadvertently) interfere with the core economy and that the core economy has been seriously damaged by growth of the market economy and its increasing influence over people’s lives. As put forward by Cahn, timebanking provides recognition, incentives and rewards for work in the core economy that a pure market system devalues and it provides a mechanism through which people and communities are enabled to take greater control of their own lives and can contribute themselves to the solution of challenges they face without needing to wait for and depend on others to provide solutions from the outside. This claim resonates with many stakeholders and holds appeal, in principle, for many establishment actors.
Linda Hogan points to Edgar Cahn’s achievement in raising interest in and support for timebanking:
“Edgar achieved a lot of funding support from foundations for trials and demonstrations. There was a lot of interest and support in the early days from agencies and foundations concerned with health care and community and family life. There was support from Universities and Research Groups. The state and federal legislatures took interest in time credits. Edgar had vision and organising skills; he was strategic and opportunistic. He put together the elements needed to turn an idea with potential into a fundable project and he linked up the different parties, putting those with potential interest in the idea in touch with it, bringing in funding for experimenting, bringing in the research groups, getting information to the legislators, formalising the system, developing training programmes, getting timebanking ready for roll-out and replication and at the same time thinking about new ways of using timebanking to address different issues.”
A key event that changed the context in the US was the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and his ending of the ‘War on Poverty’, the federal programme initiated by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 that had funded relief and welfare projects for those in poverty. This was both a crisis and an opportunity, since it meant that many of the poorest people in the US lost the financial support they received under the programme – some losing 80% of their incomes – forcing them to look to other ways to meet their needs. Two of the biggest areas of need were for health care and for care support to the elderly.
Hence, the developments at the Grace Hill community in St. Louis, the ending of the war on poverty, and the emergence in the US of the timebanking movement as a fundable and coherent project constituted the coming together of a set of related events that put community ‘self-help’ and ‘self-reliance’ to the fore of the agenda of both legislators and funding organisations. Several funding organisations and also some philanthropists were looking at that time for promising new approaches. Some were especially interested in the health care issue. This was the case for Robert Wood Johnson (RWJ) Foundation. The RWJ Foundation wanted to change the model for health care to make this cheaper and more widely available. Funders were looking for coherent ideas that could be piloted and demonstrated, evidenced to work and replicated. Replicability was critical, so these funders were attracted by a ‘system’ that offered a coherent narrative, a coherent theory of change, and a set of principles and mechanisms that could be transferred between contexts. The work and contribution of Edgar Cahn was therefore contextually very timely.
Another significant event was a speech about timebanking that Edgar Cahn gave in the mid 1990s, which was attended by Dr. Richard Rockefeller. Richard Rockefeller became a convinced supporter of the timebanking concept. He founded a time bank in his home state, in Portland, Maine. This has had several different names over its history, but is known today as the Hour Exchange Portland (HEP). HEP became a flagship Time Bank in the US with support from Richard Rockefeller. Richard Rockefeller also co-founded TBUSA with Edgar Cahn, which became a membership organisation for US Time Banks.
In one of his books, Cahn writes that timebanking as a concept was not accepted uncritically. “The idea of timebanking had a mixed reception. Some were positive. Others were negative.”
He states that the Center for Aging at Florida State University, which was looking for alternatives to nursing homes to address elderly care, saw potential in timebanking as a lower cost solution by potentially enabling care in the community and respite for families looking after frail kin. He states also that the state legislatures of both Missouri and Florida passed legislation that authorised service credit programs, but also that the legislation was not backed up financially. In Florida opposition was encountered from the Executive Branch, who wanted any money to be used to contract home help agencies. Cahn found that many people were critical of the idea that a new currency of time credits could achieve anything that could not be achieved better by money.
Cahn states he was afforded some legitimacy and the timebanking idea some greater credibility after a period of his studying at the London School of Economics, during which the LSE published a paper he had written on timebanking. He was ultimately able to argue that time credits are a complementary currency and that timebanking offered non-monetary benefits that differentiated it from either working or volunteering.
“Timebanking is attractive over volunteering because it combines self- esteem and psychological satisfaction with the possibility to receive as well as give services and it offers extra opportunities for people without work or on low incomes. And in caring relationships, offers of help are more likely to be accepted when this doesn’t feel like charity and the nature of the relation can be different. A professional home help agency worker cannot be asked to run errands or to spend time chatting, but someone in a time exchange will do that.”
A breakthrough was achieved through the willingness of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to fund nationwide trials with time credits. RFJF had been interested in service exchange and wanted to explore its potential. The Foundation invested $1.2 million at six sites from 1987-1990 to test whether service credit programs could reduce the need for nursing home care. This provided financial support for timebanking trials, but also lent credibility to the concept and the timebanking project.
The development of time as an alternative unit of account for exchanges emerged first in Japan and seemingly independently in the US at the Grace Hill community (which later became embedded within the MORE program).
Initially, the project at the Grace Hill community was not foreseen to scale up or to expand to other locations as it was embedded in specific contextual conditions which allowed the concerned community to help themselves when faced with limited financial resources. However, the MORE program attracted outside interest from the perspective of exploring its potential and its scope for replication.
Anticipating the interest in timebanking, Cahn forged a fundable movement around it through his theorizing, writing and speeches. He developed the Time Dollar Institute to undertake research into timebanking. He helped to establish a nationwide network of Time Banks and helped disseminate timebanking to other countries. His liaising with outside actors (legislators, funders, and universities) was specifically intended to create a fundable movement, to spread time-based currencies, and to attract interest in and support for timebanking.
An important aspect of the work of creating a fundable movement was also to develop projects to explore the practical potential of timebanking and develop new knowledge about it. Monitoring and evaluation have been carried out from a range of different perspectives and motivations: learning about timebanking activities and their impacts; learning how to extend timebanking to different areas; learning how to establish Time Banks; etc. However, while considerable effort has been put into learning how to establish Time Banks, very little work has been done to explore why the timebanking movement has not continued on a smooth growth trajectory. This aspect is only now receiving research attention.
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