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Deploying Time Banking for Human-scaled Economic Development Marc Brakken, Stephanie Rearick, and Preston Austin

Problematic stuff Our economies appear to be in trouble. Over the past decades we have witnessed substantial

economic gains throughout many social sectors. Much of this gain was derived by exploiting a

series of market bubbles that facilitated our ability to build infrastructures. The dot com bubble

of the 1990s included rapid development and increased accessibility of significant computational

power. The infrastructures of the housing bubble do not require explanation. During the stock

bubble that ran parallel to housing, investment firms put significantly increased resources

towards the activities that were most rapidly profitable. Investors worked with highly leveraged

portfolios focused on derivative trades. The gains that allowed for these expansions appear

diminished at the moment while the structures built by them persist. We are forced either to pay

for their upkeep or allow them to decay. We tend not to let the latter happen, so for the moment

we are bridled by the former. It is not uncommon for systems in the midst of rapid expansion to allocate resources to the

structures that allow for that expansion. (Schneider & Kay 1994; Ulanowicz et al 2006.) The

competitive advantage during expansion is on resource capture, so optimizations will tend

towards that end. The reluctance to cull structures, however, causes significant problems. Those

who produce currency in the normal marketplace, banks, retrenched as markets collapsed,

holding instead of lending their currencies in order to shelter themselves from anticipated shocks.

Economic processes reliant on bank currency became unable to perform as a result. All social

and economic processes that relied on business trade suffered a similar shock from proximal

currency evaporation. Government lending to financial institutions was intended to free up that currency so it could

resume its flow through the economy. Although directed in this manner to address the problem

of bank seizure, it provides an example of a common, and flawed, response in times of apparent

crisis. The assumption is that banks are actually the creators and dispersers of resource. They are

central institutions which spread outward the capital generated by them. Banks, however, create

currency by lending against other forms of value. The bank may signify that value since it is

willing to make a bet on it, but the bank does not generate the value. Other social forces and

community interactions generate the value. The error, stated more generally, is that structures like banks, houses, and hardware are the

things that generate value in the world rather than the processes and behaviors that contributed to

our development of stuff. The solution to poor economic circumstances is, from this viewpoint,

to put more money into stuff. This is akin to cash-strapped cities and administrators deciding to

build convention centers and redevelop downtowns, or other forms of stuff, in an effort to attract

visitors with money. There may be times when this is not entirely inappropriate. If there is a lot of currency moving

around, a signal of an active economy, structures that provide further means of capturing and

directing currency make sense. When currency is scarce, however, they are a problem.

2

Scarce dollars are allocated to places that appear to be able to generate quick return in a manner

easily recognizable to the agency dispensing the money. The source of money declares what is

valuable: tourists with dollars, infrastructure, and so forth. If communities or individuals cannot

demonstrate their ability to return recognizable value, the source excludes them. Yet as Edgar

Cahn (2000) and time banking emphatically argue, all communities and people possess value

regardless of how easily recognizable it is. One of our fundamental difficulties is that governance

and financial institutions which possess the ability to disperse capital investment are often unable

to recognize the types of value available in economically marginalized communities. The

persistently unemployed face similar problems as they search for work. Prospective employers

view a lack of a job as a signal for a lack of value. The excluded remain excluded because

without liquidity, they make no detectable ripples in the flow of money. These marginal people and communities are not simply valuable, though. Stuff is generated by

people doing things. Different types of activity generate different types of structures. Structures

are a form of wealth or capital. People come together to make productive capital that allows

them to do new things, and they do so because they have a need for it. This is like a community

that comes together to build a barn. They had been doing things that created a need for a barn, so

they build a barn. Along with it, they create a new set of possible activities. When people are empowered and do things they are likely to encounter problems. Given

resources and enough need, they will find solutions. Marginalized communities’ people do things

just as anyone else does. They encounter problems just as anyone else does. Given the means to

solve those problems they will do so. Those solutions could be significantly valuable. Yet

institutions are only able to recognize the valuable they have previously encountered or that is

closely similar. Novelty is a different matter altogether. It is only recognizable by the economy if

it impacts system-recognized values directly, or via direct human observation. In every

interaction runs the potential to develop novel solutions to unaddressed problems. Empowering

the margins empowers future solutions. We cannot predict where on the margin solutions might

arise, so we need a way of ensuring all of it can be so. Concentrated investment cannot see this

job, so therefore cannot do this job. Powering up Alternate, complementary currencies offer us ways to address this problem. Currencies facilitate

our denotation and tracking of exchange, among other purposes. We can view different

currencies as problem-solving tools. In a direct barter economy, transaction can become blocked

if one side of an exchange cannot offer something the other side immediately wants or needs. A

currency tradable in the future allows us to work around this. A currency is only valuable if someone else is willing to accept it on the premise that they can

spend it. If we develop a local currency to solve the problem of barter in our town, our currency

is correspondingly less tradable with someone in a neighboring town. If they do not have easy

means of transferring it for other goods it is worth less to them. With minimal trade between

towns we might decide this is not a problem, but otherwise we need to find a solution to distant

trade.

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A regional currency offers such a solution. If both towns accept the same money and at similar

rates of exchange, inter-town trade becomes easy. We probably discover that the increased ease

of trade across distance is useful. We could substitute the regional currency for the town

currency to increase the value of the money. If we can do more things with it, it contains more

value. Because the town currency is stickier, much like direct barter was sticky, it becomes less

valuable in turn. We cannot do as much with it. Therein lies a problem, and one that those of us interested in complementary economics are

distinctly aware of: the regional currency is optimized for regional trade. It flows easily between

towns. This means money will circulate as readily through the region as within the town. The

currency serves a different scale of exchange. Bank or federal currencies have the same problem.

The money a bank issues is really good at servicing the needs of banks and the types of activities

that bankers determine to be valuable. It is far less good at servicing the needs of communities.

During local down-cycles it simply flows away. We do not need to intend for it to behave as

such.

Because different types of currencies are optimized for dealing with the problem for which they

were particularly derived, we assert that complementary currencies empower each other by

allowing each to focus on its specialized niche. Moreover, well-functioning currencies, and well-

functioning communities, can create the contexts that attract other currencies while mitigating

the downsides of doing so. A highly functional and vibrant community is likely to attract the

attention of capital investors, and we believe at lower cost in both monetary and social terms. A

vibrant community has both lower risk and substitute means, so it commands a better position in

the marketplace when it shops for investment; it can walk away from predatory offerings. Time banking currencies are designed to directly signify marginal activities and value captured

by exchanges that other currencies are simply unable to capture. Many of the activities involved

with time dollar exchanges are activities that typically occur within communities, or those that

many involved believe should and could be better represented, but lack economic recognition

and credibility. By capturing and recording those exchanges through a formalized mutual credit

system, we are better able to demonstrate the vital role that marginal transactions, and

correspondingly marginalized people, play in our communities. Moreover, by forming a more

formalized economy around these exchanges we create the capacity for people to build various

types of capital that they can leverage for larger endeavors. The people and activities involved in time-based transactions, though marginalized by formally

established economic practice, are more than mere margins. We hold that, from a certain level of

analysis, the exchanges embodied in time banking are the very type that allow for other forms of

economy. The intimate exchanges within a community to which time banking is particularly able

to draw attention are those that create vital communities best able to generate and attract other

modes of economy specifically because their core vitality makes other modes necessary and

valuable to them. We draw analogy here to trophic food chains of ecosystem ecology. (Lindeman

1942) We envision time banking like the primary production system of an ecosystem. It allows

for the initial capture of potential energies and can transform them to more refined types. As an

example, time banking allows for people to be healthy, to have emotional needs met, to create

4

child care sharing systems, to get to and from sites of work, and there to learn and refine skills

while developing reference networks that together can establish readiness and credibility for

other forms of jobs and investment. We do not intend to develop fully this model within this document. Nevertheless, we hold that

economically disenfranchised communities, those that have been abandoned by formal market

economies, can use time banking as a bootstrapping technology and an empowering vehicle in

negotiations. Economic deprivation is not a lack of capability; it is a lack of organization that can

be significantly enhanced by a currency medium optimized for the implementation of the

capability embodied in a community and the individuals who compose it. We intend to develop a

model of time banking that empowers individuals and communities to regrow economic

capability and power up into other forms of production and exchange. Blocked Paths Time banking projects do not yet appear to be at a point where they can demonstrate or wield

this bootstrapping capability. Some reasons for this are obvious. Time banking is an exchange

system that exists in the margins of many of the communities that have implemented it.

Elsewhere it is simply absent. In periods of general economic stability and early phases of

recession, the push towards economic experiments is absent. Institutional memory directs efforts

to redevelop economies along standard paths. (Leitaer 2003) Even where time banking projects

are in effect, they remain only loosely affiliated with the broader economy. They exist as narrow

niches, mostly attracting participants on ideological bases. (Collum 2007) We contend that

marginal implementations remain significant, however. Time banking can exist as a latent

community capability to be more broadly activated when the need arises. The challenge becomes

one of scaling in the appropriate moments. In periods of general economic failure, mutual credit systems like time banking can be used to

activate community potential in absence of other forms of currency. Indeed, its basis on time-

normalized value and coproduction makes it ideal for this purpose. If it is to be rendered as

productive as possible, though, we need to understand the forces which impose limits upon it,

particularly before economic conditions reach low ebb. To achieve scale in times of need, time

banks need to be operational in advance. Their learned adaptations to predictable roadblocks

become vital in those moments. In order to achieve this end, we are analyzing dimensions of success and abandonment of current

and past time banking experiments. This paper offers a nascent assessment of these findings. We

draw upon two sources of information. Our primary interest is with the perspectives of time bank

project coordinators and organizers. We are interested in their bank-wide perspective on

operations. To this end, the Time For the World project released an initial online survey for

organizers. We asked about the current state of the time banking and complementary currency

movements in respondents’ regions; the understood goals and desires of participants; hopes and

plans of dissemination and project sustainability; and primary obstacles and opportunities. The

survey was distributed to a selected list of known project coordinators. We also posted a link to

the survey on the Time For the World project website: <http://blog.timeftw.org/>. The survey

5

remains open, and participants are able to view other responses after they have submitted their

own. Responses will be publicly available under a Creative Commons licensing agreement. Additionally, we have conducted a survey of available papers that address time banking, in

particular those that involve studies of individual sites. We have focused on the organizational

perspective more than the participant perspective initially, although the latter is used to provide

context as well as community support. We paid particular attention to stated limitations and

goals of projects. To date, we have received six replies to our survey. As a result, any interpretation should be

viewed as significantly preliminary. We intend to pursue further the inclusion of more

respondents.

We assigned responses to seven categories: need for funding; technology including software for

facilitating the finding and recording of exchanges; community awareness of the time bank;

behavior of time bank participants, particularly in regards to likelihood of exchange; services

offered; internal organizational issues; and persistence of social norms which prioritize top-down

or state-sponsored solutions to community issues, which we have labeled ‘structural

disempowerment.’ For the literature survey we included an eighth category, institutional

understanding, which refers to the tenuous relationship between time banking and national social

services in the United Kingdom. In the UK, there is a recorded regular risk of time bank

participants losing disability and other benefits on the basis of participation, as well as pressure

on participants to look for ‘real work.’

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Across both survey respondents and the current literature, the issue of reliable funding was

pronounced. Four of six survey respondents highlighted the issue. A fifth, a time bank from north

eastern Ohio, was described as significantly marginal with minimal activity. It could be that they

have not developed to the point of hiring a coordinator. The literature contained significant

emphasis on the need for secure funding, with some (North 2003) drawing a distinction between

6

the robustness of non-coordinated LETS systems versus the fragility of time banks reliant on

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Survey respondents had a parallel emphasis on technological needs, in contrast to the literature

where it received hardly any mention. This distinction could be attributed both to the age of

some of much of the literature and the relative recency of digital transitions in time banking as

well as distinctions between time banks in the United States and the United Kingdom. The issues

of funding and technology are linked, however. Online and user-directed organization help

reduce staff time and costs, a significant issue when faced with funding uncertainties. However,

many who participate in time banking, particularly those who do so for economic reasons, may

lack ready access to the internet, resulting in difficulty in gaining access.

One of the persistent difficulties expressed in the literature, but only by one survey respondent, is

participants’ willingness to offer their time, but reluctance in requesting the help of others.

Obviously, this one-way emphasis significantly interferes with the ability to generate a vibrant

co-production system as well as the empowerment of the economically marginalized. This will

be returned to in the following discussion.

The other persistent issue across both groups is the problem of services offered. Certain services

central to many peoples’ livelihoods – home repair, auto repair, etc. – are not well represented

within time banks. These absences make difficult the legitimization of time banking as an

economic system. While a partial solution is increased outreach to individuals able to provide

needed yet absent services, we believe that there is more to be done.

7

Performing Power Time banking has been developed and implemented as a means of reconnecting and empowering

marginalized members of society. (Cahn 2000) It is based primarily on notions of social good. It

contains an obvious economic aspect, but time banking as economy plays a distant second. We

believe this is a problem. Many of the barriers listed above can be viewed as derived from time banking’s lack of principal

economic focus. Many time bank participants regularly express a willingness to contribute time

to others while maintaining reluctance to ask for assistance. It becomes a volunteer system with

marginal reward instead of a currency. Earned credits stagnate instead of encourage and

empower further production. The social and individual needs the currency is intended express

and address fail to be so, and economic development is inhibited. There are probably many reasons for this. An appropriate focus on the social justice dimension

of time banking strongly aligns it with other forms of civic volunteering. This leaves people

willing to expend acute effort not motivated by expectation of reciprocal flow within the time

bank, but from excess stock gained outside it. This generosity should not be discouraged, but the

time bank structure must address it appropriately. In the case of United Kingdom time banks,

participants are explicitly referred to as volunteers, furthering this association. There are strategic

reasons for using the term – it is aimed to shelter participants receiving other forms of state-

sponsored social benefits from losing them – but costs of nomenclature need acknowledgement

and accommodation. Time banking is an alternate economy designed to provide compensation for and facilitate value

creation in meaningful activities that the regular monetary economy persistently overlooks.

Without mutual exchanges, value cannot be created. In this regard, willingness to go into debt

and allow another to gain credit is as significant as the activity performed for the credit. The idea

of ramping-up, that you cannot spend what you do not have, persists throughout our economy,

often because people do not understand the nature of debt money creation. This is particularly

true in periods of scarcity. Debt, however, when assumed for value-creating enterprise, is not a

negative. One’s debt is an expression of another’s belief in one’s value. When economic activity

is scarce for reasons other than excessive indebtedness, it should be encouraged, not shunned. Debt can however become excessive, and people are often strongly conditioned to fear

indebtedness. This must be addressed. Demurrage, where a currency loses value over time, is

incorporated in monetary systems in order to encourage the regular flow and exchange of

currency. It dissuades people from storing money under the bed by making it worth less. We

suspect that implementation of demurrage could be considered in time banks. What is more, and

perhaps counter intuitively, any demurrage should be equally applied to both sides of the ledger:

credit and debt. This is more than a simple accounting device to keep the overall sum zero as is

appropriate in mutual credit systems. It should be done because both people in the exchange are

doing the same thing. One is offering skills while the other is offering the opportunity to use

skills. Debt in typical national currencies is not of equivalent character to debt in mutual credit,

and particularly not in time banks. The more people ask for assistance, the more people allow

their neighbors to develop and grow skills, the richer the community is. There may be a limit,

8

past which point this becomes problematic. However, we suspect that national currencies come

into play before this is reached. Time bank projects are threatened by a greater issue than the economization of the currency.

Across the board, the need for operational funding remains a critical issue. The presence of a

paid coordinator holds critical significance on a time bank’s ability to be successful. Full time

coordinators are able to teach members about the workings of the bank, help with the discovery

of personal skill potentials, offer advice on how exchange, and play a general role of mediator

and counsel. Due to necessities of economic circumstance, thus far they need to be paid at least

partially in market currency.

There is a certain irony that the tool for generating wealth without currency requires currency.

Currency acquired from central sites does not come without cost. Issuers of resource are the

ultimate judge of quality of outcome. The outcomes on which they focus, as evidenced by the

continued disenfranchisement of valuable communities, are not those of our communities. What

is more, given that time banking can be at its most meaningful in periods of stark economic

deprivation, when no other currency is available, a time bank that relies on the scarce currency

will be constrained in its ability to facilitate the creation of value that the community needs.

When the need is greatest, we risk being at our weakest. Time banks need to look elsewhere for sustenance. They need to aggressively cultivate their

communities’ resources. Collum (2007) provides evidence of time bank participants’ willingness

to help support the organization they find valuable. There is the necessary question of capability

given the economic limitations of many involved, but this once again draws attention to the

necessity of economization. It should be the goal of the time bank to empower members to level

up, so to speak, and become able to generate other forms of wealth. Time banks should not be

viewed as replacements to the regular market economy but as a means for enabling a more

balanced relationship with that economy. Multiple studies of time banking programs have offered similar analyses of projects: time

banking facilitates the reconnection of communities, particularly those most likely to be

marginalized by broader social processes, but it fails to facilitate the reentry of these people into

the established economy. (Collum 2005, 2007) It exists as an auxiliary phenomenon within the

community, not critical. It is fully able to create connections and achieve social integration goals.

Its performance on economic goals still has room for improvement. Addressing these not-yet-

achieved goals is linked to the solution to the funding problem. Participants have limited ability

to pay into the time bank because they remain economically marginalized. They do so because

the economic priority, that of the exchange of value, is itself marginalized. Yes, we want to hold

to the core principles of time banking, including reconnection. Those connections, however, need

to be used for mutual benefit. Time banks must take seriously the economic value their

participants are willing and able to contribute, and in fact need it to function. Part of this means re-teaching participants about economy. From personal conversations, we can

assert that time banking is not immediately intuitive to many people. We have strongly

entrenched concepts of money, value, and exchange that are not easily disrupted. This is

evidenced in part by the aforementioned reluctance to ask for services or assume debt.

9

Gregory (2009a) offers evidence that time banking projects without an initial focus on

coproduction are able to develop that capacity through implementation alone. It would appear

that the act of exchange alone is able to teach. This appears in correspondence with theory from

other fields, like Butler’s performativity (1990) which draws attention to the coherence of

identity through the reiteration of practice. The theory of coproduction is profound, but it

becomes profound through practice. Strong training and facilitation of time exchanges and the

expansion of an exchange network that can provides referential context may be all that is needed

for the formation of new ideas of economy. Making Time For the World The movement needs the development and dissemination of a strong and flexible implementation

strategy. We need powerful, accessible, mobile, and context-responsive tools that allow us to

address better the particular needs and capabilities of individual communities. Time banking

already has taken root in 34 countries to date and has demonstrated a resiliency and demographic

inclusiveness not commonly seen in complementary currencies. Moreover, time banking values

as core economic functions many activities, such as caregiving, civic engagement and creativity,

that are undervalued when commodified in the market economy, including in market-based

complementary currencies. By providing an appropriately abundant and fungible means of

exchanging these core economic functions, time banking increases the economy’s ability to

appropriately allocate resources. Economic tools that fail to value these functions, or treat them

as market-based commodities, will frequently replicate many of the social problems our current

monetary system generates. However, appropriately scaled and locally contextualized approaches for publishing and

distributing information, training and supporting organizers and participants, and methods of

assessing and evaluating effectiveness have not yet been developed, causing time banks to

experiment somewhat blindly. Time For the World (TFTW), a new international time banking dissemination project, aims to

remedy this problem through analysis of current and past time bank and LETS programs. With

comparative studies and a focus on types and degrees of variation we intend to construct a

general time bank implementation model that can be localized for novel efforts. We wish to see time banking develop as a tool for empowering communities as a whole. We

view it as an intervention in traditional economic thought that draws focus away from the top-

down behavior of governments and other centralized institutions and towards the bottom up

potential embedded in our communities. We also believe that time banking is the type of activity

critical to any effort to redevelop local economies in a more just and inclusive fashion. It is our thesis that time banking unlocks the primary production capacities of social communities

and will enhance the sustainability and ease with which other complementary currencies,

particularly price-based mutual credit systems, can take hold. This allows local economies with a

time bank-supported core to bootstrap internal markets that need, value, and can utilize local

labor. TFTW intends to test and analyze the technique of using time banks as experiential

10

learning tools and resource bases to design and build additional local economic tools such as

market-oriented mutual credit systems. As part of this project we are proposing two complementary scaled strategies to help develop

project vitality. One, CC Labs, is a program to create, recruit and support communities willing to

test implementation models and factors that lead to greater success of complementary currency

systems, with time banking at its core. CC Labs focuses on developing focal projects able to pool

resources across a community in order to construct something that solves direct needs within the

community. In this model the project itself becomes a holder of debt, which helps smooth

barriers to adoption. We are developing a menu of project kits for experiential learning designed to produce results

that bring the community together and offer early tangible successes. Examples of the types of

scaled projects we envision are community gardens, neighborhood weatherization, a youth court,

a prison reentry program, LETS system development, meal programs, education and literacy

projects, and so forth. Like the novel currency uses proposed by Batchelor (2003), the goal is to

further facilitate exchange of credits while also transforming community potential. Actual

projects should be determined by the community implementing the Lab so that it can most

directly serve local need while involving and empowering a broad segment of the population.

We intend to provide detailed instructions on how to use time banking to catalyze the project,

including access to training and support. Parallel to this large scale and focused project, we propose that communities incorporate street-

or block-level coordinators in parallel with the general community coordinator. These

individuals would be paid in time currency through the community bank and be tasked with

generating their neighbors’ involvement in the bank. We believe this is useful for several

reasons. Neighborly assistance and favors are the significant types of activities to which time

banking intends to draw attention. These marginal interactions are not ancillary to healthy, just

economies; they are core to just economies. By incorporating neighborly interaction in the time

bank system, greater attention can be drawn to its significance. At the same time, strong person-

to-person interactions can help members realize more they are able to offer in exchange. A stated

limitation of some participants is that they are unsure what they have to offer. Often this can be

solved through direct conversation.

Neighbor-level interactions can also engender greater trust in the time bank. Feedback between

participants can occur more quickly, and pressure to follow through is more pronounced. If these

transactions are arranged through the online interface used by the time bank, it could also help

foster reliability and trust in those systems. While reconnection is the primary directive behind

time banking projects, necessary reliance on online scheduling risks reincorporating social

elements that many find alienating. Networked relations do not need to be viewed as more or less

alienating as other forms, but unfamiliarity and lack of direct feedback runs that risk. Finally, we see a need to bridge time credits with other systems like LETS. Long term viability

of any project is contingent on our ability to become self-sustaining. An active local economy or

industry able to recognize the value in time banking and community empowerment can become a

vehicle for self-sustenance. By drawing correspondence between time banking and LETS

11

systems, we hope to foster the mutual support of our social and economic communities. We

recognize, like Gregory (2009b), the need to maintain certain separation between currency types.

Different currencies serve different purposes. Bank currencies do not do a good job of

empowering communities. Time currencies can. We do not want different systems to be

completely isolated from each other; that risks interfering with people’s ability to leverage

themselves into greater capacity, but we do not think they should be cleanly frictionlessly

transferable. To do so risks devaluing both. Addressing the problem of currency interaction is

critical to the goal of community empowerment, though, so will be central to the project. We are at a point where we can no longer rely on old models of economic recovery and value

creation. Like all models, those that focused on center-out or top-down distribution of money

were false. They were merely falsities we could get away with for a period of time. Those

sources have dried up or moved away. We now need to redevelop our capacity to build capital

and value on our own, without dollars or Euros, from our communities. We need to regenerate

our ability to produce and create. A time bank focused not on community networks but on the

empowerment of those networks through mutual exchange. The exchanges are what make the

network, and the community, powerful.

Works Cited

Batchelor, J. (2003) ‘More than tea and biscuits; the role of time banks and LETS in local

economic development’. Local Economy. Vol 18(3), pp. 253-6.

Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, (New York:

Routledge)

Cahn, E. (2000) No More Throw Away People, (Washington, D.C.: Essential Books)

Callison, S. (2002) ‘“All you need is love”? Assessing time banks as a tool for sustainable

economic development’. Local Economy Vol 18(3), pp. 264-7.

Collum, E. (2005) ‘Community currency in the United States: the social environments in which

it emerges and survives’. Environment and Planning A Vol 37, pp. 1565-87.

Collum, E. (2007) ‘The motivations, engagement, satisfaction, outcomes, and demographics of

time bank participants: survey findings from a U.S. system’. International Jounral of

Community Currency Research Vol 11, pp. 36-83.

Gregory, L. (2009a) ‘Change takes time: exploring structural and development issue of time

banking’. International Journal of Community Currency Research Vol 13, pp. 19-32.

Gregory, L. (2009b) ‘Spending time locally: the benefit of time banks for local economies’.

Local Economy Vol 24(4), pp. 323-33.

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Leitaer, B. (2004) ‘Complementary currencies in Japan today: history, originality and relevance’.

International Journal of Community Currency Research Vol 8, pp. 1-23.

Lindeman, R.L. (1942) ‘The trophic dynamic aspect of ecology’. Ecology Vol 23, pp. 399-418.

North, P. (2003) ‘Time banks – learning the lessons from LETS?’, Local Economy Vol 18(3), pp.

267-70.

Ozanne, L.K. (2010) ‘Learning to exchange time: benefits and obstacles to time banking’.

International Journal of Community Currency Research Vol 14, pp. A1-16.

Schneider, E.D. and J.J. Kay (1994) ‘Life as a manifestation of the second law of

thermodynamics’. Mathematical and Computer Modelling Vol 19(6-8), pp. 25-48.

Seyfang, G. (2002) ‘Tackling social exclusion with community currencies: learning from LETS

to time banks’. International Journal of Community Currency Research Vol 6, art. 3.

Seyfang, G. (2003) ‘“With a little help from my friends.” Evaluating time banks as a tool for

community self-help’. Local Economy Vol 18(3) pp. 257-64.

Seyfang, G. (2004a) ‘Time banks: rewarding community self-help in the inner city?’. Community

Development Journal Vol 39(1), pp. 62-71.

Seyfang, G. (2004b) ‘Working outside the box: community currencies, time banks, and social

inclusion’. International Jounrnal of Social Policy Vol 33(1), pp. 49-71.

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Source: http://conferences.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/index.php/cc-conf/2011/schedConf/presentations