Community Exchange planning

In 2011, Transition Northfield plans to create a Community Exchange system, where you get a non-monetary credit for giving goods and/or services to someone else in the community and then you can use that credit to receive goods and/or services from someone else.  Some existing examples of these systems are LETS and Time Banks (see resources below).

The first meeting to plan our own Community Exchange system is going to be this Friday, March 18 at 3:00 pm at the Hideaway Coffeehouse, 421 Division St, Northfield.  At this meeting we’ll review the pros and cons of different types of exchange systems and put together selection and design criteria for our own system.  We will also schedule future meetings to move the design and implementation process along.

This meeting is open to anyone in the Northfield-area community who is interested in helping to create the Community Exchange. It would be helpful (but not required) if you can look at some of the following resources before the meeting. (I’ll also bring some printed copies.)

Introduction to Time Banks:  http://www.timebanks.org/how-it-works.htm

Q & A about LETS (from Australia; this refers to a version that uses postal mailings, but we’d use web-based software instead):  http://www.gdrc.org/icm/lets-faq.html

A one-page comparison of barter, time banks, local currencies, and LETSystems from Transition Los Angeles:  http://envirochangemakers.org/documents/sharingHO2.pdf