Holy Cross Centre Trust

The Five Principles: #1 An Asset Perspective

Each one of us has strength

How much of you is really on your résumé?

5%? 10%? 20%?

Do you put down that you know how to scramble eggs, garden, replace a light bulb? I don’t think so. How do we value a lifetime of learning and caring? Consider these words from a senior after her adult children visited her. Looking sad and very depressed, she declared: “I have nothing left to give -but love.” How can giving love, informed by a lifetime of caring, be “nothing?”

All of us have value far beyond money and far beyond those skills that the market values. Time Banking is a way to acknowledge and value all we do, and the capacity of all those whom the market does not value.

Amazing things happen:

• Teenage girls who thought they had no skills shampoo and curl the hair of older women whose arthritis makes it difficult for them to raise their hands above their shoulders.
• Men who have reached retirement age are part of a home repair crew that fixes leaky faucets, puts up curtain rods, fi xes lamps and gets old toilets working properly.
• Just going to play cards or looking at old photos or reading books and newspapers for those with failing eyesight has ended long periods of isolation and depression.
• Teenagers with strong backs and arms have used shovels and pitchforks to turn barren plots of winter-hardened soil into f ower and vegetable beds for frail elders.
• Middle school children have brought computer literacy and e-mail to homebound seniors while others have created special days in nursing homes by bringing their pets to visit.
• Time Bank members have donated Time Dollars to a refugee program so that the newcomers who lacked driving licenses could get rides to work – and the newcomers, in turn, have reciprocated with a Food Around the World fest.
• In Time Banks, rides are more than rides: in a car, even teenagers open up and talk to adults; and seniors feel less anxious about going for a medical appointment.
• With the immediate crisis from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita over, Houston Hope is using Time Banking to turn evacuation into rebuilding a future.

Time Bank programs consistently have been able to bridge lines that have otherwise been hard to cross: bringing together young and old; bridging ethnic and language lines; bringing disabled persons and developmentally challenged persons together with children, families and neighbors in ways that ended past social isolation.

Principle No. 1 says: A person’s problem looms large but it is only a part of that person. We need to enlist and unleash the rest. You cannot mobilize a defi ciency any more than you can build on quicksand. It is time we started valuing those whom the market may not value; children and teenagers, the disabled and elderly.

Maybe it is time to get to know our neighbors.

AN ASSET PERSPECTIVE tells us the glass is at least half full.