Thursday, April 29, 2010

Voluntarily Trading Time

At what amount do you value an hour of your time?  Is it ten dollars, thirty dollars, one-hundred dollars per hour, more?  The value you assign to an hour’s worth of your time may vary, depending upon what your time is spent on.

In the currrent economic climate, the value of your hour’s worth of time may be depressed, or possibly not readily and voluntarily tradable, thus underground economies and rather unusual barter markets.

Here’s an interesting way to barter your time, in one hour trades, Time Banks.  Time Banks describe their purpose, beyond voluntarily trading time, as a social change movement.  Here is how Time Bank is supposed to work.

At its most basic level, Time banking is simply about spending an hour doing something for somebody in your community. That hour goes into the Time Bank as a Time Dollar. Then you have a Time dollar to spend on having someone doing something for you. It’s a simple idea, but it has powerful ripple effects in building community connections.

Each Time Bank has a website where you list what you would like to do for other members. You look up Time Bank services online or call a community coordinator to do it for you. You earn Time Dollars after each service you perform and then you get to spend it on whatever you want from the listings.

With Time Banking, you will be working with a small group of committed individuals who are joined together for a common good. It connects you to the best in people because it creates a system that connects unmet needs with untapped resources. To see what happens each week when you are part of Time Bank is deeply fulfilling, especially if you are helping to make it run.

I have not fully reviewed all the information (there is alot) at the Time Bank website, which is linked above, but the idea has implications which could be far reaching.  Well, at least until the IRS decides to tap these voluntary trades, as Karen De Coster notes.

UPDATE: Oops, I neglected to link to the original story.  Time & teamwork

Posted by John Venlet on 04/29 at 11:28 AM
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