Currency projects can be used to shift the balance of power within public sector and voluntary organisations, transforming the way their services are designed and delivered.
A currency can help organisations explicitly value the contribution people make to their work, tap into underused resources in a local area or uncover the expertise of service users in designing the provisions to best meet their needs.
This symbol indicates community currencies employed to these ends - projects that aim to improve and democratise the public infrastructure required for societies to thrive.
# Democratising services and organisations
In recent years, currency initiatives have become recognised policy tools for local governments. As monetary transactions are more and more prevalent in public service provision, people increasingly relate to these services – whether leisure, education or healthcare – as consumers rather than active citizens.
Specially designed currencies can alter the dynamic of these increasingly monetised relationships, reinvesting them with social meaning.
# Meeting community needs Particularly since 2008, many states in Europe and around the world have taken political decisions to significantly shrink local government budgets. The needs of the communities that these budgets formerly served have not, however, disappeared. The shortfall created by a reduced public pot has given the rhetoric of citizens ‘doing things for themselves’ a new, politically loaded, significance.
When people are required to step in with their own time and resources to fill holes left by public funding cuts, inequalities become starker. Areas where residents tend to have more spare time and money are immediately advantaged over others. As such, cutting budgets with no provisions in place to keep social initiatives and key public services afloat has had a negative impact on community building. There are, however, more proactive steps that can be taken towards building communities with more active, empowered citizens.
As local authorities are pressurised into finding new ways to deliver services, growing numbers of currency designers are teaming up with forward-thinking public bodies to meet the latter’s complex demands.
Currency initiatives are practical responses to a range of policy areas that don’t aim to replace or rollback public services, but rather to transform them into being more useful and better value for money.
Though requiring significant upfront investment for lasting success, both in terms of economic viability and input from practitioners and end-users, community currencies can offer the long-term reward of a cost-effective tool that brings people actively into the process of solving the needs of their community.
# A new way to deliver services: co-production
Co-production is a relationship where professionals and citizens share power to design, plan and deliver support together, recognising that both partners have vital contributions to make in order to improve quality of life for people and communities.- from Commissioning for outcomes and co-production: a practical guide for local authorities
Currencies can positively alter the relationship between public services and the people they aim to serve. In a public sector setting, co-production is increasingly used in the commissioning, design and delivery of services. Instead of trying to ‘fix’ people’s needs, co-production looks at people’s assets (their time, expertise and skills), and builds a more equal partnership to mutually design and deliver public services.
This approach is opposed to (and indeed emerged as a criticism of), traditional, top-down and centralised models of service-provision, which see users largely as passive ‘recipients’. As funding cuts put this model under increasing strain, co-production has gained the attention of policymakers as a possible alternative.
Community currencies offer a lever for realising the potential of co-production. They allow local authorities, professional organisations or businesses to explicitly value, and thereby incentivise, the contribution of the general public to their services. If well designed and implemented, a community currency can bring new ideas and inputs into public service delivery in a cost-effective way, strengthen independent community-based initiatives, recognise talents and activities not valued by the mainstream market economy and create their own dynamics of interaction and exchange.
People can be enabled to engage differently with care, education and leisure providers, such as health services, local council programmes, schools or charitable organisations. For instance, timebanks, in valuing people’s time equally and incentivising schemes that encourage socially and environmentally beneficial behaviour, are prime examples of currency models designed to address this area.
- Makkie
It is essential to emphasise that co-production is not a quick fix or an excuse for making individuals and communities unrealistically responsible for their own welfare; nor is it a silver bullet to the challenges of reductions in state funding. Although some of co-production’s benefits can be easily monetised as direct savings to the state, many of these will likely be realised only in the mid- to long-term, while others (such as wellbeing or empowerment) can be hard to measure quantitatively.
Currency projects can enable councils to collaborate with other local stakeholders, such as independent businesses, residents’ groups and charitable organisations. They are a tool through which constituents can knit together their resources proactively in order to strengthen a local economy and community, rather than reactively as councils are forced to do in the face of budget cuts. The broad aim in this scenario is to connect communities’ excess resources, including the undervalued skills of its members as well as local facilities, in a way that better fulfils the needs and wants of that group and the wider community.