WUNRN
Via Other Worlds
Mutual Aid Networks – Timebanking – Sharing Resources
A New Way to Build Community Economics & Women’s Local
Empowerment
By Stephanie Rearick
July 29, 2015
Stephanie
Rearick is founder and project coordinator of Mutual Aid Networks. She is also founding co-director of the Dane County [Wisconsin] TimeBank, and former co-chair and former interim
co-director of TimeBanks
USA.
A timebank is a system of mutual credit, where a
member provides a service to someone else in the timebank and gets credit,
which they can redeem for that same amount of time to get something they need
from another person in the network. Timebanks capture our imaginations and
allow us to replace some of our financial pressures with community supports. Engaging
in timebanking lets us enhance our social ties, stretch our budgets in this
money-based economy, and free up our time. Timebanking works beautifully for
growing informal community economies, where people used to meet their basic
needs before they were swallowed up by the monetary economy.
But timebanking
can’t do everything. It’s great for exchanging the abundant resources of
caregiving, creativity, civic engagement, and community building - many of the
things that tend to stay in the informal community economy and are often un- or
undervalued. But we also need ways to help support local businesses in the face
of global competition, and for some things we simply need money. Perhaps even
more, we need to rebuild our commons and re-learn how to share.
Now we’re working
to redirect competitive economic dynamics by designing and developing a more
cooperative, decentralized alternative to help resources flow within and
between our communities. We can supplement timebanking and enhance its impact
by forming cooperatives around a common purpose, like cooperatively managed
pools of money (community savings and investment pools) and other forms of
mutual credit and shared resources. We’re calling this cooperative framework
Mutual Aid Networks, or MANs.
The mission of
Mutual Aid Networks is to create the means for everyone to discover and succeed
in work they want to do, with the support of their community. We can be the job
creators. By redesigning our own work lives and working together, we can make
the economy work for us and our needs. Instead of going out and finding a job -
working for “the man” - we want to create a situation where you can design your
ideal work life, as a whole human being, working for the Mutual Aid Networks.
With timebanking helping to identify and catalyze the exchange of people’s time
and talents toward a common purpose, the additional common resources enable
people to save their money together, invest it, and then choose how they
allocate funding to accomplish common goals.
We help people in
the local network figure out how to rely on each other, pool existing
resources, and leverage them to hire their friends and community members to
make their own dreams and projects a reality. For example, you could form a
Mutual Aid Network for a specific purpose such as food security or a specific
issue such as racial disparity or disability inclusion, by connecting with
other people who already are working on the issue. A MAN can form at any scale,
for any purpose, as long as it upholds our core principles.
A real-world
example from Dane County in Madison, WI, involves a neighborhood called Allied
Drive that has been dealing with many challenges, including poverty, food
scarcity, and incarceration. Several activities in this neighborhood are linked
to the Dane County TimeBank. Different timebank projects have been addressing a
variety of these needs, including poverty and diverting youth out of the
school-to-prison pipeline. A local cooperative and the very first local Mutual
Aid Network, called the
Allied Community Co-op, has been created by residents and
neighborhood organizations in partnership with the timebank. It has organized
community wellness activities, a small store, and garden projects.
The co-op also
began a project called PowerTime, where we partnered with our local utility
company to train a number of neighborhood people to do energy consulting, for
which they earned timebank hours. These energy consultants worked with neighborhood
families to make small, energy-saving changes. On average, households
participating in the energy consultations reduced energy use by 10%.
The vision for
PowerTime was to build participation in the co-op and energy project and have
the participating families track the dollars they saved on their utility bills.
A percentage of these savings would be pooled for cooperatively managed
projects. In the case of the Allied Drive neighborhood, the goal was to
generate a mutual savings pool to get better transportation for youth and
people with medical needs, and obtain good food in an area with no grocery
stores. Everyone in the neighborhood benefits when local assets are pooled and
leveraged for the common good.
Allied Co-op has
since shifted gears to respond to a growing shortage of food resources, but the
energy project will continue. The next step for the Allied Co-op is to create a
neighborhood resource center, which includes our timebank store, space for all the
community organizations and projects, shared computers and sewing machines,
joint working space, and a buying club for food. It will also include a
neighborhood college where neighbors propose and teach the classes, earning
timebank hours.
We’re currently
working with people around the world to establish 15 Mutual Aid Network pilot
projects, sharing all of our learning so we can determine what works best under
varying local conditions. Most pilot sites are starting from an existing
initiative like a timebank, a local currency, or a co-op – whose members want
to add another piece of the Mutual Aid Network framework and experiment with
how these collaborative exchange strategies can support each other to address a
specific community goal.
In service to
this learning and sharing, we have established an umbrella cooperative with
global membership, called the Main Mutual Aid Network. The Main Mutual Aid
Network, incorporated here in Wisconsin where we have excellent cooperative law
and history, connects local projects and global supporters. We are
experimenting with member dues and rebates. We are also creating an egalitarian
and inclusive decision-making process to determine how money gets allocated.
It’s actually a
way to play with the community savings pool model. In a co-op, you collect
member dues and you can provide member rebates. But in our global co-op, we
will base rebates on many different kinds of contributions, not just monetary.
Ours will be based on such things as work on local projects and training
initiatives. This mechanism for distributing resources helps get them where
they are most needed.
We’re offering a
web summit, an online learning series. We’re also inviting people here to
Madison, Wisconsin, on August 20-28 for a MAN Up Summit. We’ll host trainings,
collaboration sessions, work sprints, learning games, and a launch party. Come
be with us and/or help us fund others to get here!
To start a timebank or a Mutual Aid Network project, or to learn more, visit our website at www.mutualaidnetwork.org or contact Stephanie Rearick at info@mutualaidnetwork.org.