Community Building

Time Dollars: A New Currency in Community Building

by Edgar S. Cahn

Building social infrastructure and assessing community assets have been key elements in past efforts to rebuild communities. Time Dollars add a third piece. Time Dollars are a currency to record, store and reward transactions where neighbors help neighbors. People earn Time Dollars by using their skills and resources to help others (by providing child or elder care, transportation, cooking, home improvement). People spend Time Dollars to get help for themselves or their families, or to join a club that gives them discounts on food or health care.

Time Dollars enable human beings for whom the market economy has no use to redefine themselves as contributors, and they give society a way to value activities the market economy does not. Time Dollars empower any person to convert personal time into purchasing power, stretching limited cash dollars further. Time Dollars reinforce reciprocity and trust, and they reward civic engagement and acts of decency in a way that generates social capital, one hour at a time.

In the process of developing applications for this new medium of exchange, the Dollar Institute has seized upon a fourth element — one that is even more basic, more fundamental than Time Dollars. It is called Co-Production.

What is Co-Production?

Co-Production is the essential contribution to change efforts needed from the ultimate consumer in his or her capacity as student, client, recipient, patient, tenant, beneficiary, neighbor, resident, or citizen. Experience with Time Dollar programs leads to a hypothesis: Without Co-Production, nothing that professionals, organizations or programs do can fully succeed. With Co-Production, the impossible comes within reach. If this hypothesis is true, community-based groups, policymakers, and human service agencies must be convinced of the indispensability of that contribution, and they must begin to intentionally generate Co-Production from the recipients, targets, or consumers of their efforts. Reciprocity must be central to achieve social change. This is the Co-Production Imperative.

Co-Production is not simply a euphemism for expanding or enhancing specialized social services with free labor contributed by the consumer. Its function and its power are far more fundamental. If undertaken as a priority and intentionally, Co-Production can yield new and more effective services and outcomes. It triggers processes and interactions that foster new behaviors. It alters conventional distinctions between producers and consumers, professionals and clients, providers and recipients, givers and takers, investors and managers. By creating parity for individuals and communities in their relationships with professional helpers, it achieves systemic change.

While Co-Production values what professionals have to offer, it also poses a challenge to prevailing notions of "best practice" to the extent that "our best thinking" has led us to where we are — paralyzed or frustrated by our inability to make inroads on major social problems because we have failed to incorporate Co-Production as a pervasive strategy that redefines roles, relationships, processes, and outcomes.

Yet as critical as It is, Co-Production-the essential labor needed from the ultimate consumer — is never fully funded and rarely directly funded, even partially. Instead, we fund specialized programs, professionals, outreach workers, and local organizations-paying staff while the extensive and essential labor from the individual, the household, or the community goes uncompensated. We rarely lay out this inequity so explicitly. In part, that is because the cost of actually purchasing that labor at market prices, even at minimum wage, would be prohibitive. So we tiptoe around the issue, calling for "community involvement," requiring "citizen participation" — without insisting on it too directly lest somebody ask us to pick up the real cost. (Think of the family as a good example of Co-Production)

Time Dollars are a mechanism for rewarding that reciprocity and converting that contribution into compensated labor. They are a mechanism for securing Co-Production