When Kola Met Currency
The Kola Nut Collaborative (KNC) is a mutual support network of people engaged in reciprocal exchange of services, skills, and goods through a timebank where the currency is an hour of time for everyone. Our mission is to promote and sustain a robust timebanking infrastructure which supports non-monetary transactions amongst individuals and organizations allowing a greater sum of the realized value of work to be retained and shared within local communities. Our vision is to make social infrastructure visible within our communities. Social infrastructure describes the invisible bonds and relationships which constitute a generative capital that can be accumulated and circulated through timebanking.
“Time is a currency which diminishes when held encouraging us to maintain the velocity of trading.” — Mike Strode
The Kola Nut Collaborative was formed in 2015 inspired by the pioneering work of Chinyere Oteh of St. Louis’ Cowry Collective. Our intent was to expand the landscape for time-based social exchange in Chicago by cultivating a timebank that might connect creative, entrepreneurial, social, civic, and human service sectors through a community based currency which could provide a viable medium of trade between these constituencies. In 2017, the establishment of the timebank was realized through partnership with Black Oaks Center for Sustainable Renewable Living who invited the Collaborative to facilitate a social permaculture curriculum for its Lifeboats 2017 Permaculture Certification. The students formed the initial cohort of membership within the timebank and afforded us the platform to develop strategies for engaging Chicago neighborhoods in this form of exchange.
Michael Tekhen Strode is founder and Exchange Coordinator for the Kola Nut Collaborative. He is a collaborative social economist, systems thinker, technical project manager, writer, and devoted resident of southeast Chicago. His imprint has been left within a number liberatory social structures over the course of 17 years in the city including Black Oaks Center For Sustainable Renewable Living, Healthy Food Hub, Fultonia, and Red Bike & Green — Chicago. He studies and promotes timebanking within the larger vision of advancing social economies, local currencies, community resilience, and food systems development.
“Timebanking is a currency of participation. The value of each timebank grows in proportion to the number of members who value its social infrastructure enough to trade some of the opportunity cost of their time to broaden the skills and services available to the community in trade for time dollars.” — Mike Strode
As a community currency design project, the Kola Nut Collaborative seeks to restore the social commons using a timebank as a means for community residents to exchange their skills and services using units of time as a bankable, tradeable currency. In the tradition of credit’s earlier appearance as a factor of one’s reputation for productivity and reciprocity within the village, the Kola Nut Collaborative seeks to design a social currency which holds both value and values as a means to measure participation in the social life of the community rather than placing a greater value on work performed external to that community.
Central questions which have guided the Collaborative in engaging organizations as members of the timebank include: “How much work is excluded from any valuation by the monetary economy?” and “How do we deploy a complementary community currency which emphasizes the importance of that work?” These questions have led us to develop efforts such as the Kola 101 orientation, Time Salon series, Chi Hack Night Community Currency Design working group, Open Collaborative Ideation sessions, and upcoming Currency of Social Structure pop-up no-money marketplace. All of these efforts are designed to plant the seed of social economy within Chicago communities with the hope that it can form the catalyst for a much greater propagation of complementary local currencies which increase the velocity of exchange in communities that are overlooked or ill served by the existing monetary economy.
