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BANKS: A TOOL FOR COMMUNITY STRENGTH & RESTORATIVE JUSTICE – SERVICE
CREDIT OPTION FOR WOMEN +
Interview with Stephanie Rearick - By Beverly Bell –
February 25, 2015
One timebank member leads other members on an edible plant walk, teaching
how to identify and use wild edible plants.
Stephanie Rearick is a former co-chair and interim co-director of TimeBanks USA. She is also founding
co-director of the Dane County
[Wisconsin] TimeBank, and project coordinator of Time for the World/Mutual Aid Networks.
Timebanking is mutual credit, where whenever somebody
provides a service to a member in a timebank, they get credit, which they can
redeem for that same amount of time to get something they need from someone
else in the network. It’s fluid and flexible. Timebanking doesn’t have to
involve a direct exchange between two people, and it doesn’t have to happen in
the same span of time.
The impacts are pretty profound. Matching people up based
on who needs what and who can provide what is a different approach to an
economy. It’s an understanding that everybody has needs and everybody has
assets. Also, you don’t have to wait to have money to pay for a service you
need.
The norm in this society is that we have a human-service
kind of economy through charity. There’s a group of people who serve and a
group of people who are served. Timebanking takes the approach that we all
engage, as equals, based on what we have to offer and what we need.
It’s also really good at connecting people who wouldn’t
otherwise meet. As a community-building and community cohesion tool, it’s
excellent. It helps people get past barriers that they’ve grown up with,
whether it’s racism, or classism, or ageism. It really helps people get to know
each other across demographic and geographic boundaries.
About 40 counties around the world have timebanks. In the
US, our best guess is that there are between 200 and 300, with more being
created regularly.
In Dane County, we started neighbor-to-neighbor timebanks
and got offers of a wide variety of skills and resources. Exchanges included a
teen boy teaching crocheting to a 70-year-old woman. A friend of mine taught a
basic email class for a group of seniors at a church, and got her porch
re-roofed with the hours she earned.
Now we use timebanking to pool resources and do community
projects that otherwise we might not be able to carry out. We had a crew of
people help each other plant gardens, for example, and also clean out a house
for someone who was hoarding and was at risk of being evicted.
We also have a wellness project, where a crew hosts a
monthly healthy meal and brings in people to teach non-clinical self-care like
massage and feldenkrais. We have medical transportation, with folks providing
rides to patients from rural areas who need to come to Madison for kidney
dialysis, for example, or to get back home from outpatient surgery. We have
inclusion projects that are geared toward creating opportunities for people
with disabilities to more fully engage with their communities, both giving and
receiving skills.
So while the timebank gives us more resources for less
money, it also helps to rebuild all those community supports that can keep
people healthy and whole and out of trouble. It gets at some of the root causes
of the problems, lowering them at their source.
We created our timebank in Madison in 2005 with a goal of
getting people involved in Restorative Justice Youth Court. And that’s really
taken off. We went out and recruited kids who wanted to be jurors. Then we paid
timebank hours to adults to conduct trainings in restorative justice for the
jurors, and to help facilitate the project.
Here’s how it works. Instead of giving a young person a
ticket, the police give him or her a restorative justice referral, and the
respondent comes to speak with the jury of his or her peers from school or the
neighborhood. We offer jurors timebank hours for their time. Then the jurors
work to design sentences or agreements, addressing it if there’s a clear victim
or if there’s harm caused, but also sentencing respondents to things that
really appeal to their strengths and interests. Then we tap the timebank for
those resources, too.
One example, a girl wanted to be a drummer so, as part of
her sentence, she was required to take drum lessons from a timebank member. She
keeps earning her drum lessons by helping out in the community. We had someone
who, as part of her community sentence, had to meet with a massage therapist to
learn how to get into the field she thought she wanted.
With 2,500 timebank members to draw from, we can find
almost anything that is tailored to the individual kid’s experience and
circumstances. Then the timebank can also provide rides when the kid has to do
the sentencing agreement service.
There are all these informal social contacts that
develop, and they’re a lot of what helps get the kids back on a better path.
Then there’s also the shift in the culture among the kids who participate. They
feel accountable to each other, feeling heard and feeling a sense of ownership
over how justice can look in their own community.
I get a lot of requests to share information about the
restorative justice youth program. St. Louis has been emulating parts of ours,
and their timebank has been promoting a way to pay off bench warrants through
timebank service. In Providence, they’re starting to do some youth court kind
of stuff, redefining school sanctions like suspension and expulsions.
One thing that I’m super-excited about is that now both
our county and Madison are moving toward applying this model to adults. We’re
piloting a small young-adult peer court, to catch the kids who have aged out of
the juvenile restorative system.
It will be really good if we can [use this system to]
navigate toward a more constructive path than police brutality and mass
incarceration.
We’re also working with our municipal judge to pilot a
homelessness restorative court, for all these people who’re getting tons of
municipal tickets just because there’s no legal place to sleep in the city.
We’re starting to work with the judge to have restorative justice circles where
peers - people with relevant expertise such as mental health training - and the
respondent come to a sentencing agreement together, and the respondent can work
off their tickets in a better way, like by community service work. It's
possible that one of our community partners may be able to get them into
housing in exchange for work they'll complete in the program. If they need
alcohol and drug abuse help, we can create a network of organizations,
advocates, supporters and peers to help them navigate the system.
We’re really blessed here, because we have a judge and a
police chief who are very committed to restorative justice. We’ve had such a
terrible record in Dane County with racial disparity in our criminal justice
system. We are very lucky that people have started taking action before things
get totally blown up like they have in other places, like Ferguson and New
York. It’s really hopeful.
If you want to join or start a timebank, timebanks.org can show you
how. If you want to start a timebank that can contribute to a restorative
justice youth program, write to danecountytimebank.org/contact.