Local money that STAYS local

How would you like it if you had to continually circulate part of your blood thru a tube to another person for the rest of your life? 

If money is the blood stream of Los Angeles, every dollar we spend at Wal-Mart or Amazon.com circulates out of our local body, never to be seen again. 

Local currencies, hundreds of efforts over 30 years, is again a big topic.  Greg Wendt, is a long time local community builder, acting for the Board of the Green Business Networking (http://www.greenbusinessnetworking.com/aboutus)  convened a dinner salon at Rawvolution, on Main Street in Santa Monica, Sept. 16^th.  The first 40 people were lucky to get in.  Over 50 requests to attend were received. 

Greg introduced Chris Lindstrom of BerkShares (www.berkshares.org) who started a local currency and also has software to facilitate local currency efforts.  Hollis Doherty also spoke on the famous Austrian “free money” experiment of 1934 (here  http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?read=103723).

After a delicious meal and lively conversation, the evening’s topic was Changing our story about money:  From ‘too big to fail’ to ‘small is beautiful.’  Hollis says, “The shift in thinking about our money is likely to be a momentous as the shift from a flat Earth to a round Earth.”

Our mainstream money system is a cultural blind spot.  Whenever public polls are taken on the question, “Tell me what money is and how it works,”  few know, even people working in finance get tongue-tied trying to explain where money comes from. 

Currency activists therefore have the job of helping people learn a new $ story.  Slogans like “small is beautiful” are not a story, not sufficient. 

Lots of face to face conversations--with examples—need to happen showing why “spending money that goes around is better than spending money that goes away.”  This is the message your local biz people need to learn:  Money that comes back to you beats money that goes out and never comes back to you.   Conventional bizs have a similar concept.  They call it a "loyalty program."  Local currency is money that stays loyal to a community wishing to take back control of its financial vitality and destiny.

Chris Lindstrom added:  We believe in our present US central currency system like we believe in the Law of Gravity.  But how money circulates is not a Law of Nature! 

We have to become more conscious of money, what it means, what the consequences of our spending are.  A “sustainable economy” means “meeting the needs of the present, without compromising the needs of future generations.”

Local currencies thrive where Cultural Creatives wish to meet each other and build local community.  “Thrivability” and resilience mostly take this form today:  “I prefer to spend all my dollars at green-conscious businesses.  Can you give me a way to do that?“   Greg Wendt hopes to create a local currency within green businesses in the Los Angeles region making it very easy to support your local Cultural Creative businesses. 

Local currencies are legal.  People pay taxes on Ithaca Dollars.  Universities and larger orgs are starting to accept “complementary currencies.” 

Back to money as blood.  Raise your hand if you take blood out of your body and store it away fro a rainy day.  No one?  Our blood works best when it circulates!  What would our internal body economy be if we tried to save our blood?  We know we have to circulate!

This raises interest paid on loans and savings.  Ellen Hodgson Brown (http://www.WebofDebt.com) suggests harnessing interest to public works, as the early Quakers did in Pennsylvania (no taxes!) and as Ben Franklin and Abraham Lincoln proposed and tried successfully.  Ellen has a way for a Calif. state bank to solve many of the CA budget crisis. 

Changing our story about money ultimately challenges us to change our story, all the way back to Original Sin, and abandon images of ourselves as inherently sinful, separated, and disempowered, says Chris.  The story has to move to:  “These are my people; what can I do to support us, with how I spend my dollars?”  What’s your community?

All local currencies increase opportunities for gratitude and highlight the gift of service we do for each other, in our labor for each other.

It's not who has a good idea. It's who can make it happen.  If you think you can help make it happen, contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Bruce Dickson  ~  ToolsThatHeal.com  *  HealingCoach.org  *  SelfHealing101.net