LETS

LETS today are essentially mutual-credit systems for individuals, rather than businesses. Members of a LETS advertise their skills and services and exchange these with other members in return for credits.

LETS are intended to mobilise the latent capacity of a community by providing both a forum and medium of exchange outside the conventional market economy.

The networks are co-operatively managed and self-regulating and are commonly associated with the ideals of empowerment, localisation and community building.

Unlike timebanks, they have no central broker and members negotiate prices for services, with credits normally valued on a one-to-one basis with national currency, rather than in time.

The growth of such do-it-yourself currency initiatives broke with the assumption that monetary and financial innovation was the exclusive purview of governments, or inevitably wedded to the needs and wants of corporations and banks.

Instead, currency experiments started to be harnessed for the benefit of people, local businesses and their wider communities.

Within this bottom-up innovation, the first modern experiments with time-denominated currencies emerged at around the same time. Explicitly focusing on social exchanges, time-currency systems were popularised in the early 1990s by Edgar Cahn, who first coined the term ‘time dollar’.

Cahn anchored the practices and ethos of the ensuing wave of currencies on the values of solidarity, equality and respect. Timebanks and time-credits are the two types of community currency that most directly reflect these values.