Holy Cross Centre Trust

Time Banking as a paradigm shift

A paradigm shift means: we need another map to get where we are going. If we have the wrong map, driving harder and
faster won’t get us there.

We are using the wrong map:

• seeing those we help only in terms of their problems without valuing their strengths;
• defining the economy only in terms of money and work only in terms of jobs;
• treating clients as consumers and not as partners and coproducers in building a better world;
• building walls of privacy and confidentiality that leave those families isolated and vulnerable;
• defining value exclusively by market price so that despite abundance, we live with scarcity.

We need another map.

In different settings, now spread over more than 20 countries, Time Banking has demonstrated that:

• ethnic barriers fall when every group is regarded as bringing special cultural gifts that enrich all;
• age barriers fall when seniors and teenagers discover that each can do things that the other can use and value;
• seniors can create a limited form of long-term care insurance with Time Dollars earned helping each other with rides, companionship, shopping, home repair, informal support;
• Time Banking provides the extended family that every parent can use in coping with the creative ways that children and teenagers identify and master the hot buttons of their parents;
• test results and attendance improve in schools when older students tutor first and second graders; both tutor and tutee learn;
• juvenile arrests drop when teen offenders sit on a jury with power to sentence kids who did just what they did a few months earlier;
• graffiti disappears when the responsible teenagers are sent to a Time Bank where they not only paint over the graffiti but use their talents to paint neighbourhood walls with murals.

A paradigm shift occurs with Time Banking because new possibilities emerge. When we tap all that people can do, we deal with abundance, not scarcity. We no longer have to reduce the safety net. We can create a new and better safety net for all who are willing to do the real work needed for rebuilding the village and restoring our ecosystem.

We can end the catch-22 that comes when those whom we try to help learn that the way to get more help is by having
more problems. We can end the frustration of human service professionals who have been turned into gatekeepers finding more and more creative ways to say: “No”.

Time Banking enables human service professionals to ask those whom they help to pay back by helping others. Clients become paying customers helping to build the world we all want. And helping others becomes a way of unleashing the capacity of those being helped. When volunteer coordinators and outreach workers become matchmakers, catalysts and community weavers, the return on social investment multiplies. And increases in the health and vitality of the Core Economy provide a new measure for authentic growth of the Gross Domestic Product.

It is just possible that the earth is not flat. Time Banking offers a different map of the world we know – and the world we can create.

That is a PARADIGM SHIFT.