The Providential Gardener

Time Banking Comes to Rhode Island

"A Time for Transformation: Banking on Families & Communities to be the Change" was the title of the 2011 TimeBanks USA conference held at Brown University this past weekend (August 4-7). More than 150 people attended from as far away as the UK and Spain for an information-packed program that featured the unveiling of their new mission statement* (see below, and it's also on the blackboard in the photo), a preview of the organization's new website, which is to go live in the next few days, and the brand-new, Drupal-built "Community Weaver 2.0" website that is a robust tool for handling unlimited numbers of new TimeBanks and streamlining the management of the more than 270 TimeBanks currently set up in the United States.

What is Time Banking? The short answer is: Time Bank members spend an hour or several hours doing something for another member, thereby earning "Time Dollars" that are recorded in their TimeBank on Community Weaver. they can in turn spend the hours they have banked when members do something for them. Members list what they would like to do for others, and search the services offered to spend their Time Dollars on what they need done. Everyone's time has equal value: one hour equals one hour. Time Dollars are an alternate currency, a complementary currency (but not a replacement) to money as we usually think of it, sorely needed as we watch the Dow and S&P plunge these days.

The basic idea is simple, but the practice of Time Banking would have profound and substantial benefits for Rhode Island if we could "get" this. It clearly can integrate into the existing programs of environmental and social service groups and reinvigorate our neighborhoods. It values EVERY Rhode Islander equally and has tremendous potential for positive societal change.

The TimeBanks website is the place to begin exploring. Check now, but also go back and check in a few days when the new website is sure to be live. They have immensely improved the training materials, resources, and support. In the more than 30 years since Edgar Cahn came up with the idea, they have worked out solutions to many of the problems that have sunk earlier time banking experiments and trials. Time Banking's time has come!

To get started, I highly recommend hearing an 8-minute interview with Edgar Cahn (pictured in the photo above) on NPR July 19, 2011, "Beyond Bartering: Banking On Community Connections." It will whet your appetite for reading his books, such as "No More Throw Away People." Talk about a recycling program!

There already is a Rhode Island TimeBanks Initiative currently under the auspices of the Parent Support Network of RI. Our local TimeBanks movement is poised to develop quickly as we catch on to this way of working together for the common good.  We are fortunate that the Executive Director of the RI TimeBanks, Lisa Conlan-Lewis, is also on the Board of Directors of TimeBanks USA and is developing member services. Rhode Island is already wired into the national movement and resources.

I will be writing about this in more detail on the Providential Gardener and sharing updates to ecoRI on Time Banking as I read up on this fascinating and practical approach to getting necessary work done. There is so much to say, and Rhode Island is the perfect place to make Time Banking take off big time.

*TimeBanks USA Mission Statement:

"To nurture and expand a movement that promotes equality and builds caring community economies through inclusive exchange of time and talent."

Rhode Island ~ The Denmark/Sweden of the Northeast?

Recently I spent about two weeks in Denmark and Sweden. It's inspiring to see what can be done differently regarding environmental policy implementation.

I think someone should arrange to send every Rhode Islander, and especially our political leaders, to Copenhagen or Stockholm or Malmo to live for a few days with residents and Danish/Swedish planners and civic leaders. We would learn a lot by discovering firsthand how they set up their infrastructures and provide public services. Visitors can't help noticing millions of bikes and wide, separate bike lanes raised a bit from the auto lanes; frequent on-time buses; no overhead wires! buried utility wires except for street lights; compact cities and farms everywhere else, it seems; cows grazing just outside the Copenhagen airport; wind turbines lined up along the Copenhagen shore and near the Oresund bridge....  Take a look at this fabulous Flickr image of the bridge and turbines. This is within sight of Copenhagen and Malmo, Sweden.

Click on photos to enlarge.

The first photo shows, from the left, a Copenhagen sidewalk, separate bike lane (atypically empty but there is a bike with front cart coming along), parked car lane and auto lanes, with minimal overhead wires needed only for street lights. The second photo, taken not far from the Little Mermaid's spot (she is at the World's Fair in China at the moment ~ Shanghai'd so to speak), shows the Copenhagen skyline toward the harbor with some wind turbines just offshore.

Denmark and Sweden are world leaders in environmental matters. Of course they have much smaller land areas and populations than the United States. However, they can be models for Rhode Island if we take a closer look at them. Both the Copenhagen and Stockholm urban areas have populations about the same or double that of Rhode Island, and like Rhode Island, they have significant waterfront and water features -- notably canals all over Copenhagen, and islands -- 24,000 of them -- in the Stockholm archipelago. It's worth exploring the similarities and differences between Rhode Island and Scandinavia as we work toward restoring Rhode Island's economy by incorporating environmental industries and sustainable ways of life.

Until this recent Great Recession, Denmark had extremely low unemployment and a robust economy. It still is one of the strongest economies in the European Union. Sweden has had a similarly strong economy but is experiencing more strain from the recession. I heard more than once that many young Swedes are going to work in Norway, where jobs are more plentiful and the pay is better.

Nevertheless, these nations were able to reach substantial internal consensus years ago on transportation and energy policy, recognizing the importance of self-sufficiency and the need to collaborate and cooperate for the public good. Why can't we learn some things from them? Once you see Copenhagen and Stockholm, you'll see it's obviously possible to implement sustainable environmental policies AND maintain a robust economy. Can't Rhode Islanders find the willpower to create our own sustainable and robust economy?

Tom Horton, Ecosystem Restoration, and the New Economy

Sigh.

We set goals, and then things happen. It always seems to take longer to achieve success than we can ever imagine.

That's what struck me as I reviewed my notes from the 7th Annual Land & Water Summit held on March 27, 2010, at URI. Tom Horton, the keynote speaker, has made the Chesapeake Bay's restoration his life's work. He described how the goal date for cleaning up the Chesapeake has slipped from 2010 to 2028. Voluntary compliance doesn't work well, he noted. Legislation with teeth, plus the money and will to enforce the law, are required for success. Adequate legislation and enforcement, in turn, rest on long-term monitoring and research. So restoring a large watershed like the Chesapeake (and our Rhode Island watersheds around the Narragansett Bay) takes a lot of time, money, and willpower.

Much of his talk reflected the substance of his book, Turning the Tide: Saving the Chesapeake Bay (first published in 1991 and updated in 2003). To get a sense of what you missed if you weren't there Saturday, you can skim some of the book's pages on Amazon and read a review of this book in the U. Richmond Law Review and a review of another of his books, Bay Country (review published in 1987 in The New York Times). You'll also find in an Amazon search a few other books on the Chesapeake that he has written or coauthored. 

For Horton, Chesapeake Bay, like Narragansett Bay, is a magnificent ecosystem coping with pollution and the overharvesting of its fish and crustacean resources, yet still resilient despite increasing human activity in and around it. He quoted Aldo Leopold ~ that "the oldest task in human history [is] to live on a piece of land without spoiling it." He stressed that grow-or-die economic models are simply unsustainable. It's all well and good for each of us individually to reduce our carbon footprint. But if the population around the Chesapeake is growing at the rate of 2 million per decade, how can enough people offset their carbon footprints enough to offset this population growth? Think about that for a moment.

We need to convince people there are viable alternatives to the never-ending-growth model, that the options are multifaceted and not either/or ~ either overeat or starve to death. Our own Greg Gerritt, who writes extensively on this topic in Prosperity for Rhode Island, could be seen nodding his head in agreement every time Horton drove this point home.

As I continue to digest all the fascinating ideas from the Summit, I've found the link to the Chafee Memorial Lecture in Washington DC in January 2010 that Horton stressed repeatedly. This lecture, "A New American Environmentalism and the New Economy," was given by James Gustave Speth, dean emeritus, Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. The session was videotaped and posted on the web, so we can view it when we want. [FYI, It took a long time to download on my high-speed internet connection, and there's a bit of an introduction before he starts speaking, but hang in!] Horton urged the 325 Rhode Island conservationists present at the Summit to see environmental issues in a larger, systemic context, to ally with others working for political reform and for social justice projects,... and to CONTINUALLY QUESTION "GROW OR DIE" ASSUMPTIONS.

A quote of a quote from the Chafee lecture: "Anyone who thinks that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist." ~ Kenneth Boulding 

Here's a shorter interview with James Gustave Speth, The Environment and Economy in Conflict to whet your appetite for the Chafee lecture:


I began this post with a sigh, but I'll end with a story that illustrates our state's motto, Hope, which Horton describes as not being able "to see your way through the tall grass." He told of a short-legged dog that actually learned to jump up high enough to get his bearings when lost in the tall grass. Encountering Tom Horton's thought is to learn to leap up for a better view.

P.S.: In light of all this rain we've endured since the weekend, here's another idea from his talk we can implement: Let's pass impervious surface tax legislation in Rhode Island.

For other reports on the 2010 Land and Water Summit, see ecoRI and search for "Conservation Summit Focuses on Land and Water Issues"