The Comprehensive History of Timebanking and How It’s Ready To Spur a Great Awakening
How the idea of exchanging services through time evolved throughout civilization, and where the bright future lies ahead of us.
The 2020 election produced many moments and many emerging stars in the political sphere, none more exciting than Andrew Yang, whose dominating focus on universal basic income catapulted the tech CEO to the national consciousness.
While his Presidential campaign fell short, he continued his political career with a new campaign for Mayor of NYC. Through his popular podcast and campaign platform, Yang continues to interrogate big ideas and solutions. One of his other major interests is timebanking, a way for individuals to give and receive help for any type of service (graphic design, haircuts, copywriting, translation, elderly care) without exchanging money. He discussed his interest in timebanking and Edgar Cahn’s founding role in a 2020 podcast with actor and entrepreneur Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
When you perform a task through timebanking, you accrue credits for the time it took to accomplish that task. You can then spend it on services you need that someone else in the timebank provides. A step above both bartering and volunteering in both sophistication and added value to yourself, it also produces real relationships with whom you interact.
While many are encountering timebanking for the first time, it is a longstanding concept, with many pioneers and innovators. We have provided a full history below. This is a living history, so let us know if we missed anything, and we will continue to update it with new information.
The Long Road of TimeBanking
The first thought-to-be socio-economic group of the paleolithic area was the band, a close-knit pod of about 25 members that achieved a level of self-sufficiency. Several bands were part of a tribe, which would interact when members needed to trade goods. To accomplish this, they would barter, where each band needed to possess something the other band wanted to trade effectively.
Pod-based self-sufficiency turned to more complex bartering to currency and the market-based economy where several factors influence the fluctuation price of any particular good. Over time, we have strayed further from the pod, where individualism and zero-sum profit-making have trumped our ancestors’ collectivism and win-win mentality.
Of course, the modern world would not exist without the market-based economy, which has driven scientific, technological, and societal growth. Yet, something is missing when we lose our communities’ bonds: most importantly, trust.
The stronger our communities and the incentives for participating in them are, the more we return to trust. A host of issues have punctured the strength of our communities, but there is one emerging way to return to them: timebanking.
TimeBanking is a more formal process of something innate in most if not all humans. Unless you have chosen to live a hermit’s life, you have likely done favors for someone: helped them move into their first apartment, brought them soup when they were sick or pizza and wine when someone broke their hearts because it was the right thing to do and, not to be discounted, because it also made you feel good.
Doing something without an expectation of money is the foundation of many things, volunteerism, friendship, participation in a nuclear family, but also timebanking. Where timebanking differs — and this is crucial — is that the work you do accrues a real, tangible payment — banked time you can use to get the help you need.
Returning to the “moving” scenario above. It’s a common practice to “pay” someone in “pizza and beverages” — this is, in effect, a barter. But what if you don’t have money to pay for those refreshments. Or if your friends won’t accept anything resembling payment. What do you do with that built-up goodwill given to you by your friends? If you’re like most people, you keep your ears up and jump at the opportunity to help the next person you know who needs help moving or otherwise.
This is the foundation of a timebank. Put simply, it’s a way to exchange most services (but sometimes goods) using time instead of money.
Given that timebanking draws upon some base principles and human conditions, it has several “inventors,” some of which were unknown outside of the communities they created.
Precursors
As long as there has been the exchange of goods and services, there have been alternative theories on how to price them most accurately. Classical economists have asserted that the fair price of a good or service is whatever the market will pay.
The time banking concept is somewhat modeled on the labor theory of value (LTV), which, while having its roots in Marxist theory, has been studied by classical economists (including Adam Smith) throughout history. It posits that the real cost or value of any good or service should be determined by the labor cost to produce it.
Modern or classical economists will argue that the cost/value of a good is subjective and variable based on what price the market will bear.
The LTV posits a more equitable pricing structure as everyone has the same amount of time in a day and labor is a tangible good with real opportunity cost (you, in theory, can only do one thing at a time, so by not doing X, you are freed up to do Y).
This concept has inspired many experiments and innovations that have ultimately led to the timebanking revolution.
In the early 19th century, Robert Owen imagined a Utopian society built upon cooperation. A textile Barron, he was nonetheless a strong advocate for the eight-hour workday. He tried to establish multiple “Communities of Equality” in the US where the citizens organized in cooperatives and attempted to build resilience by making their own clothes and tools and growing their own food.
Owen’s 1832 tome The Crisis is perhaps the first modern tome to advocate labor rather than money as a natural exchange in the hopes it would target unemployment.
He purchased one such town, New Harmony, Indiana, from a religious organization the Rappites, which preached equality through religion. Owen instead believed equality could be achieved through breakaway communities where all individuals agreed to confer equality among each other. While the community didn’t prosper, his ideas proliferated. Today, New Harmony retains some aspects of its Rappite and Owenism heritages, with a 750-person community that has worked to maintain echoes of its founders’ vision.
Owen birthed Owenism, which was oriented around cooperation and equality in society. One of the reasons Owen’s communities may not have prospered because they could not agree on ways to share the wealth. They used money, which has its inherent inequality, and argued over many shared elements.
Josiah Warren learned about Owenism and became inspired to visit New Harmony. While he came away from the experience less-than-impressed by the community Owen had created, it reinforced his pursuit of equality.
Warren eventually created the Cincinnati Time Store in 1827, where customers used “labor notes.”
The Time Store featured two radical developments, both of which followed the belief that time was a more equitable unit of currency than money.
His pricing model for items sold at the store was the cost of goods plus a markup for his time. And the second was that goods could be purchased with labor notes, units of time a person would commit to providing work.
The teacher eventually became the student. After abandoning New Harmony, Owen created the National Equitable Labour Exchange and introduced labour notes in increments to London and Glasgow by establishing banks and businesses that accepted them. The concept did not succeed, but its influence continues throughout history. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon also attempted unsuccessfully to establish a People’s Bank in France, which was also based on labour checks.
Adjacent Projects
What drives timebanking is a sense of inequality in the market-based economy, so there have unsurprisingly been other ways to tackle the issue that did not specifically involve timebanking.
Paul Glover founded Ithaca Hours — where each hour of labor was worth $10, which could be used as a payment for goods at participating businesses. He did so because he felt his community needed a better way to care for itself, far away from the machinations of money and speculation. In a 2000 essay, he detailed how tenuous the founding of Ithaca hours was, requiring a quorum of businesses to agree to participate before it could be viable.
Then there is the BerkShares, a local currency created in the Berkshires to inspire people to spend locally. Effectively equating to a 5% discount for using Berkshares, the proposition is less significant savings than a more streamlined way to encourage the community to spend its money locally.
Greece and other countries devastated by the Euro financial crisis create favor banks, according to The Atlantic, where citizens could exchange goods and services with each other in a form of bartering.
Modern Timebanking
Teruko Mizushima, Inventor of the Volunteer Labour Bank, is a time-as-currency pioneer. Volunteer Labour Bank is considered by many to be the world’s first recognized timebank in 1973.
Source: TimeRepublik Facebook
Mizushima is not well-known outside of knowledgeable timebanking circles and Japan, but she is among the first to create a mechanism for exchanging services for time.
According to Jill Miller, who has studied Mizushima’s life and career, her idea of time as a currency originated her strenuous nighttime routine of housework that led to physical exhaustion. She felt a deep sense of not “owning” her own time and felt people, especially women in a patriarchal world, should set some time aside for themselves. She became fixated with the idea that time could and should be more valuable than money. While she remains little known outside of Japan, her work influenced Fureai Kippu, a timebank across Japan, focusing on providing for the elderly. Anyone can participate by devoting time to helping the elderly with tasks, and then they can spend those accrued hours at hundreds of organizations.
But it is Edgar Cahn who is the father (or the Johnny Appleseed, if you will) of modern timebanking who is most responsible for its growth from pockets of the world to a truly global phenomenon. His handiwork can be found at TimeBanks.org (formerly TimeBanks USA), a national network of 9,000 timebanks. In his eighth decade, Cahn is as passionate about and dedicated to timebanks as ever.
I chatted with Edgar and his wife TimeBanks Board Member Dr. Christine Gray over Zoom in January.
Cahn was a speechwriter for Robert Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, but left government work in 1968 to focus his efforts more exclusively on defending the rights of Native Americans.
Edgar told me that he learned about inequality and injustice at an early age, imbued in him by his father Edmon Cahn, who gave up his law practice to devote his time to teaching and writing well-known books such as Sense of Injustice and The Moral Decision: Right and Wrong in the Light of American Law.
Edgar Cahn’s sense of justice only compounded in college when inequality was made manifest due to falling in love.
“When I attended Swarthmore College, I fell in love with an African-American woman when interracial marriages were illegal in many states,” Cahn told me, about his first wife and collaborator Jean Camper, who sadly passed away in 1991. “I remember being pulled into the Dean’s office for the act of daring to have breakfast with her. When you become aware of the sources of privileges white people, especially men, have, you begin to see the world through a different lens.”
Cahn’s passion for fighting injustice grew stronger. He knew he had to choose between anger or constructive change. He then threw himself into projects, organizations, and writing assignments that spurred on change. He is the well-respected author of No More Throw-Away People and Time Dollars. He also wrote an iconic essay with his wife Jean, The War on Poverty: a Civilian Perspective.
“I noticed nonprofits focused on the war on poverty were into service delivery, but not into rewarding what the recipient did or rewarding their behaviors,” Cahn said. “There was the notion that maybe we needed to find relevant rewards for the people whose behavior we were hoping to change.”
“With social justice and poverty, we needed to generate their sense of hope and being valued,” Cahn said. “When I proposed service credits to the Citizens Crusade Against Poverty and other organizations, they were largely rejected by people I respected.”
Edgar created TimeBanks USA (now TimeBanks.org) in 1980. Its first project was with the Grace Hill Settlement House in St. Louis, MO in 1981, when it introduced TimeDollars to its Member Organization Resource Exchange (MORE) program.
It took time and resources for Cahn to spread the gospel of timebanking.
“I had to prove it would work on a small basis in places like public housing,” Cahn said. “We mortgaged the house to keep time banking alive but, I was convinced that, given the chance, it would spread.”
Spread it did, but not every country and culture views timebanking similarly. The United States has historically resisted timebanking because of its individualism and hustle and grind culture, though that is changing.
“In Wales, it went like wildfire. In Japan and Taiwan, it was clear there was a cultural fit,” Cahn says. “In England, I would lecture in the House of Lords; in the US, if I could creep under a nonprofit’s door, I was happy.”
Outside of Cahn’s tireless advocacy for timebanking, two other trends helped spur growth.
“The personal computer was coming into existence and becoming the big thing,” Cahn said. “We thought, why not use that to create a network of exchanges?”
He also noted that the greatest generation was hitting 65 and 70 at this time, and discovering ageism was deterring them from working when they still have much to contribute.
Around this time, Elinor Claire “Lin” Ostrom was debunking the tragedy of the commons, proposing that if individuals collectively banded together by establishing rules for the common land, they could create exponential value for their assets.
As TimeBanks USA grew, it went into established community organizations (like Grace Hill) looking to help them provide a better mechanism for the exchange of labor that was already happening. But word spread very quickly, and more people wanted to use timebanking to create new community organizations.
It now provides CommunityWeaver3, a software that helps people run their timebanks more efficiently. It maintains an active list of communities using the software.
But the internet also created the opportunity to organize individual timebanks and create one global one with members throughout the world.
Gabriele Donati and Karim Varini founded TimeRepublik in 2012 as a result of a lifelong friendship spurred initially by seeing a television report on timebanking and by conversations they had about creating their own. Like Cahn, they saw the Internet revolution as a way to bring timebanking to the masses. They envisioned one giant timebank, unencumbered by borders, where people could help each other both online and in person. Since its founding, it has attracted over 100,000 members in 100 countries. It just recently relaunched with a community function, where users can create their own timebanks and like-minded communities to bring the world even closer.
TimeRepublik has also helped corporations bring timebanking to their workplaces to build camaraderie and improve interpersonal dynamics and employee job satisfaction.
But their most important work with organizations has been helping community groups in Italy, Colombia (through the Corporación Contigo Colombia), and Georgia (country of through the Education Development and Employment Center — Georgia) create their timebanks to better build local resiliency.
TimeRepublik believes it has the opportunity to continue to innovate on the concept of timebanking. COVID-19 has certainly demonstrated fissures in a market-based economy, where the government held endless debates about whether to give money to its citizens and how much while giving millions of dollars directly to businesses.
TimeBanking Expands and Gravitates Towards Groups
The Guardian detailed how the Gorbals community in Scotland created a timebanking currency called the Lipton (as the famous tea company originated in Glasgow — which previously created its own Lipton currency notes).
Timebanking is a fertile group for artists, who are conditioned to cooperatives, look towards their communities for resiliency, and are inclined to experiment.
E-Flux, which bills itself as “a publishing platform and archive, artist project, curatorial platform,” hosted its own timebank and promoted artistic projects that featured them. One impressive example was Time/Bank in Frankfurt, which was described this way:
At Portikus, the Time/Bank will be comprised of four main components: an exhibition of artist-designed prototypes for a time-based currency; a currency mint that will print and circulate four hundred Hour Notes — one for each hour of the exhibition; an archive of Notgeld notes — the legendary German alternative currency popular during the hyperinflation of the 1920s; a branch of Time/Store offering a range of commodities, groceries, and articles of daily use, as well as a selection of artist’s editions and books produced by Portikus.
One of the best use cases of timebanking is healthcare, where more tasks than you would initially think can be shared by the community, and market costs tend to be exorbitant.
Richmond, VA-based Sentara Hospitals introduced timebanking as a way to mitigate costs for its asthma patients. Patients could earn TimeDollars by checking on their fellow patients to ensure they were taking their medicine and were not experiencing attacks. This initiative reportedly cut treatment costs by 70% and minimized the number of patients that required emergency room visits.
Each timebank has its own story.
Then there’s the story of Dr. Abbie Letcher, a Family Medicine Specialist in Allentown, PA. She moved from California to Pennsylvania, in part, because she was looking for a hospital where she could also do timebanking.
She located and became a member of Community Exchange, a time bank run by Lehigh Valley Health Network’s Office of Health Systems Research and Innovation.
Future of Time Banking and Peer-to-Peer Exchange
The conditions are in place for a greater interest in peer-to-peer exchanges like timebanking (which could more accurately be described as peer-to-peer-to-peer).
Distributed ledger technologies like blockchain and alternative cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Etherum, and others signal a society looking for decentralized structures. And while there are plenty of people who wanted to get into these technologies to manifest individual wealth (a motivation as old as time), others see it as a way to claw back some self-sufficiency and drive a community, this one connected by the global internet.
TimeRepublik has a longstanding partnership with Mangrovia Blockchain Solutions and is actively assessing how the blockchain can bring a new dimension to timebanking. It is entirely possible in the future that underfunded projects could start in the timebank and use blockchain technology to turn time spent on fulfilling that project into actual money or alternative currencies. More to come on that.
TimeRepublik is also pioneering its own version of UBI (Universal Basic Income) by dispensing TimeCoins monthly. The project will be piloted for the first time this year with governmental institutions in Colombia, South America.
Also, politicians are increasingly discussing the possibility of timebanking and P2P networks to supplement, complement, or replace government initiatives.
Many organizations, such as Michel Bauwens’ P2P Foundation, conducted ample research and experiments to understand different mechanisms to foster trust and collaboration between peers and communities. Many have felt let down by national and local governments, not to mention scientific and health experts, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it is reasonable to believe interest in these exchanges will only increase.
As for timebanking, Cahn and Gray are very bullish for the future. TimeBanks USA appointed Krista Wyatt, Executive Director, in 2020, and recently celebrated International Timebanking Day (which coincides with Edgar’s birthday) via a Zoom call with people whose lives were impacted by timebanking.
“We’re enormously hopeful about the future of timebanking,” Gray says. “It takes a long time for a new way of doing things to enter society. From the very get-go, it’s felt like we’ve been rowing a boat against the current, so we’ve learned how to dip those oars in the water differently.”
“You’re running against an addictive thing — money, but I think younger people are going to be fantastic at it,” Cahn says. “I feel it’s continued to grow and spread steadily.”
As for TimeRepublik, we are excited about the future. We believe the next five years will be when millions of people discover timebanking, thanks to the internet, social media, and a strong desire for purpose and more meaningful use of their time. It will be amazing to see just how the next generation grows into timebanking and makes it their own.
Please join us and the timebanking revolution here.
