“Some people might think it's a little subversive, printing your own currency and all,” she says, “but the sole purpose of what we're doing is to get people to interact with their neighbors. Building a community of relationships, that's the whole rationale behind this thing.”
Thus comes Isaac's explanation of the Flathead Barter HOURS Exchange, a fancy name for a fairly simple economic system, a barter method set up to operate outside of the dollars and cents of everyday commerce.
Isaac, who helps craft and teach adult education curriculum for the state of Montana, has watched as her students struggled to stay afloat amid modern economic currents. Many, she said, were marginalized by the standard monetary system - they were time rich in a world that values those who are money rich.
Her students had skills, she said, but certainly didn't have the time or the business expertise to turn them into full-time enterprises. Starting a small business, after all, is an all-or-nothing proposition. It's hard to do it halfway, and it's hard to quit what employment you have in order to take on the debt and the risk of going it on your own.
And so their skills had, in modern America, no value, and the people with those skills were likewise undervalued.
“I don't know how people can make it in the Flathead Valley,” Isaac said. “The median income is something like $27,000, and the median price of a home is $170,000. People make $10 an hour and spend $5 of it on child care so they can go to work. It's impossible.”
But Isaac knew another economy existed, parallel to the dollar economy, a neighbor-to-neighbor exchange usually conducted over backyard fences. She grows sprouts, for instance, and vegetables, and keeps a few chickens, too, and so often traded eggs or greens for, say, the loan of a power tool.
“Neighborly trading,” she said, “that's all it is.”
She shares and borrows and trades in her “little circle of friends. And we all have that group of friends who help us out, water the plants when we're out of town, whatever. Wouldn't it be great to connect all those little circles?”
The basic swap is the oldest of economies, and is the root, really, of modern monetary systems, too.
Back in 1989, in Ithaca, N.Y., Paul Glover was researching the history of local economies when he came across a 19th century “hour” note. Printed by a private company, it was worth an hour's work, and could be spent at the company store.
Ithaca already had a “local exchange trading system,” in which credits for goods or services could be exchanged for other goods and services.
Earn a credit for babysitting, for instance, and spend it later on carpentry services. There was no currency, though, just a community log book of credits and debits.
So Glover got to thinking, and in 1991 printed his first “one HOUR” and “half HOUR” notes. “In Ithaca We Trust,” was the motto, and the bills have proved a remarkable success.
A massage therapist was first to sign up, agreeing to take the bills as payment. Then a toy store owner. In the first-ever exchange, Glover himself bought a samosa at the local farmer's market.
The Ithaca HOURS program has since boomed, incorporating in 1998, establishing a board of directors in 1999, becoming a model as the country's first modern local currency.
An HOUR there is worth $10, and banknotes come in denominations as small as one-tenth HOUR and as large as two HOURS, with several million dollars in value traded since 1991.
The hospital there accepts HOURS, as does the credit union, the library, the movie theater, farmers, restaurants, plumbers, landlords. A special bank even provides HOURS start-up loans for small business, and some employers pay their workers, in part, with HOURS.
“I don't expect anything that big here,” Isaac said of her upstart Flathead barter currency. “I do not want to be the Flathead's Alan Greenspan, I know that.”
Instead, she wants to orchestrate a small economic upheaval, in which people list their goods and services in a directory, collect Flathead HOURS for those goods and services, then spend them with others in the directory.
It bolsters small-town economics, she said, and keeps the exchange local. It's the same sort of program now in existence across the nation - in some towns local currency accounts for as much as one-third of all the money circulating - and usually crops up during times of weak dollar values and increasing inflation, when individual purchasing power starts to slip.
The system levels the playing field between rich and poor, she said, even redefines what it means to be rich or poor, and provides a new answer to the question of how best to measure the bottom line.
Suddenly, someone with a skill but no way to turn that skill into a full-time business can use their extra hours to make HOURS. Everyone's HOUR is worth the same, whether doctor, plumber or farmer, and inflation is controlled by printing HOURS only as trade demands.
And because the currency has no value beyond the immediate community, it increases the economic multiplier many times over, as the HOURS circulate around and around, always local.
The government has no problem with local currency, Isaac said, so long as it doesn't look too much like the government's money; and the Internal Revenue Service has no complaint either, so long as the fair-market value of all those trades is declared each year.
It is, Isaac said, money backed by people and their skills, as opposed to your run-of-the-mill greenback, “which is backed by what, exactly? Something like $5 trillion in national debt?”
This month, Isaac is busy printing money. Unlike the nation's currency, her HOURS will not feature an old white man of the ruling elite and a very big building. Instead, the words “Flathead HOURS Exchange” are set against hand-painted mandalas. On the back is a map of Montana, with the Flathead Valley highlighted, and the words “In Each Other We Trust.”
It's all on a very distinctive and durable paper, chosen specially to avoid counterfeiting, with serial numbers and stamped embossing. Each bill also is hand-marked for identification.
“Counterfeiting is not a primary concern,” Isaac said, “but it is something we had to consider.”
Mostly, though, she's considering how to get people signed on. She's been spreading the idea word-of-mouth and with posters plastering the valley, and so far about 100 goods and/or services have been submitted for the inaugural directory.
Music lessons are listed, and power-tool loans, event planning, home-brewing consultations, archery expertise, photography services, food, artwork and computer design are among many other items.
Lots more are expected, she said - perhaps 300 items by the April 5 directory deadline. She'll publish next month, in time for an April 29 potluck at Kalispell's library where participants with directory listings will receive three HOURS each to get things rolling. (She's printing one HOUR, half HOUR and quarter HOUR notes, with an HOUR equal to $10.)
The kickoff is timed to catch the eye of the spring farmers market businesses, and will be followed by another directory in October. That one might include firewood, rather than fresh greens.
If all goes as planned, she'll be printing about 100 HOURS every six months, as interest grows.
But the amount of currency in circulation is only one way of measuring success. The real goal, Isaac said, is to empower people, and to link people together, and to get her community working together for its own good, rather than for the good of a few out-of-state business owners.
Of course, those listing goods and services can always say “no,” can always choose not to give more music lessons if they're already booked up, for instance, “because it's not like you're starting a business,” Isaac said. “You're not committed to it the way a business owner is.”
Unless, of course, you are a business owner already - and not a few of those are expected to sign up, as well, although the initial effort is largely aimed at individuals.
“I'm just trying to pull people together a little bit,” Isaac said, “so they take an interest and some pride in their community and their neighborhoods.”
It's a good thing to turn local eggs into local currency into music lessons into more currency into a massage into yet more currency and then back into eggs again, but what really counts are the relationships created in all that exchanging, and the community building that comes of knowing your neighbors and valuing their skills.
“You have to jump in,” she said. “That's what makes things like this happen. You have to get involved, and participate, and get to know people a little better.”
Because, she said, “if you're ever in a spot, and you need to reach out to your neighbors, it's a whole lot easier if you already have an established relationship. That's what this is about.
“The only shareholders are everybody.”
Barter your bucks
Have a skill, a service, some goods or some free time you'd like to turn into “money”? Drop a line to flatheadbarterHOURSexchange@yahoo.com, or to P.O. Box 3423, Kalispell, MT 59903. Deadline for a listing in the spring 2008 barter directory is April 5. There is no cost, and those included in the directory will receive three HOURS, valued at $30, to jump-start the program.
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Lee Hendrickson wrote on Nov 10, 2008 1:58 PM: