What is The Exchange?
The Exchange is a group of community members and local businesses that are forming a co-op to promote the use and circulation of a time-based cooperative currency to benefit community members, local business and area nonprofits.
The Exchange is a benefit to local nonprofit and community organizations by promoting volunteerism and community participation. It benefits local businesses through cooperative promotion, increased exposure, introduction of new customer bases and the creation of commercial networks. The co-op helps individual community members by supporting projects that improve the local standard of living and by offering a way to extend incomes while supporting local nonprofits, community organizations and other individual community members.
Additionally, the co-op will provide a number of everyday consumer and business related products at exceptionally affordable prices through collective buying. Right now we are focusing on nonperishable household and office products as well as member requested items. These Items are sold to members at or below cost.
On top of all of that, we have plans to develop a community center that will act as a drop spot for donated items to be given to community members in need, or to be reconditioned/repurposed for exchange or trade. The community center will house a maker space for local artists, inventors and tinkers to create, work on and share Ideas. It will have a used book store, a lending library of tools, books, and other resource that members can use on site or borrow. But best of all, it will have a community venue and coffee shop for musical and theatrical productions, community meetings, weddings, swap meets and a whole bunch of other community events. If we find the right space we might even have a commercial kitchen.
What is a Cooperative Currency
A cooperative currency is a locally produced currency that is designed to work cooperatively with a national currency. My favorite way to describe it is to say “It is like printing money!” Which, by the way, is not illegal. Counterfeiting is illegal, but producing an object or product that people readily agree on the value of, and mutually agree to openly exchange for other good or services is widely practiced. The most established and widely known example is Ithaca Hours in Ithaca, NY. Established in 1991 and still circulating. Ithaca Hours are even accepted for deposit at the local credit union. A more recent example is the Bay Area Community Exchange. BACE has only been around a few years but is 2500 members strong and facilitates many hundreds of hours of community exchange.
For more information search cooperative currencies, timebanks and LETS.
What is a C-Note
One C-Note is equivalent to one hour of community participation. This is generally accepted to represent $10.00US and is a fair exchange for a contributed hour to support fellow community members and local organizations that support the vibrancy of our community. However, this amount is by no means set in stone. The value of each C-Note is negotiated in each transaction. At first this may seem to undermine the value of the currency. But in reality, this is exactly how most national currencies function. A gallon of milk in Vail can be as much as $7.00, yet you can find a gallon of milk for $2.99 in every corner of the metropolitan area. If Jane Barista can talk you out of an hour of your time in exchange for a cup of coffee, that is between you and her. In the same regard, if you have a complicated legal matter and you find an attorney that accepts C-Notes, said attorney has every right to negotiate a few more C-Notes per hour.
The C-Note is a negotiable instrument that represents a social contract to do good deeds and support a cooperative and inclusive community. A C-Note comes into existence when a community member constructively and measurably participates in making the community better. They are also generated by local businesses that support nonprofits and community endeavors. Is that vague? It is kind of supposed to be. The point of the Exchange is to stimulate creative and meaningful interactions to build a stronger community. A rigid framework is not conducive to that goal. The paradigm shift here is that you do not earn C-Notes, you don’t save or hoard C-Notes. You generate and trade C-Notes. You pay it forward and pay it back, just by using the notes. The more notes you produce, the more good you are doing, the more you have in your hand the less good you are doing. It is a currency of abundance that is designed to augment and make using the currency of scarcity easier and more fulfilling.
