Holy Cross Centre Trust

The Five Principles: #2 An Asset Perspective

Honoring real work, the work the market fails to value

The world we want for ourselves and our children will take work. Right now, we count only two kinds of work: paid work and volunteering. That hasn’t gotten us where we want to go. No society has the money to buy, at market prices, what it takes to raise children, make a neighborhood safe, care for the elderly, make democracy work, preserve the environment or address systemic injustices. The official workforce does not include the old and the young, the disabled, those on public assistance, housewives and neighbors. The market does not value or pay for at least five critically important kinds of work: caring labor, civic labor, social justice labor, environmental labor, and lifelong learning.

Time Banking provides the answer to the question: What would it take to mobilize the workforce we really need? It’s pretty simple:

• 1. Find out who can do what and when they are available.
• 2. Find some way to match the worker with the work.
• 3. Record the work.
• 4. Value the work – provide a meaningful incentive or reward as compensation.

Time Banking supplies the technology needed to record what people can do and the service they provide and receive. Recruitment methods vary. Sometimes a matchmaker calls up; sometimes people make their own matches. Non-profit organizations utilize Time Banking to enlist their clients and their community as partners, co-workers and co-producers of the outcomes they are funded to achieve.

Different organizations use different incentives to enlist members and reinforce the value of contribution:

• Health equipment, taxi rides, social events for senior patients in Brooklyn.
• DVD players, clothes, appliances for community building in Appalachia.
• Trips, driving lessons, concerts, and DJ workshops in Wales.
• Soap, diapers, food, furniture all priced at 1 Time Dollar in St. Louis.
• Recycled computers for Youth Court jurors in Washington, D.C. and both tutors and tutees in Chicago.

The incentive is based on what it takes to produce meaningful results. It is never determined by “market value” of either the merchandise or the Time Banking work.

In one public housing complex that used to be regarded as a war zone, a five-year-old with pigtails the real work of building did her job keeping the grounds clean. One day, that meant going up to a former gang leader, complete with gold teeth, chains and tattoos and saying: “We have trashcans here and we use them.” He picked up the candy wrapper he had tossed on the ground. She used the Time Dollars to get dancing lessons.

Time Dollars have paid for weddings and funerals and even childbirths provided by midwives. They have paid for hours of legal services to close crack houses. Some programs tithe, dedicating 13 10% of their grants to incentives.

TIME BANKING HONORS the Core Economy