Time Dollars is an idea by Edgar Cahn. He and his wife formed the National Legal Services Program back in the sixties.

The basic idea of Time Dollars is that they are service credits where 1 hour of service = 1 Time Dollar. Organizations that use Time Dollars include community hospitals, HMOs, community colleges, senior networks, churches, child care centers, etc. The use of Time Dollars is to advance an organization's mission. Time Dollar programs generally concentrate on providing one-on- one services an area not usually provided by existing volunteer programs.

Reciprocity is a central idea. People who receive a service in turn offer their time. So an elderly person may benefit from a service, and reciprocates by doing what they can, for example making calls as part of a quality assurance aspect of the program.

The logistics include, recruiting volunteers, receiving requests for service, matching volunteers and recipients, keeping track of hours, quality control.

One of the problems with Time Dollars is that even with cursory inspection it begs many questions. One question that pops to the top is: How can people spend their Time Dollars? The answer depends on the program. The answer also depends to a certain extent that some people who earn Time Dollars never use them.

In Brooklyn during the mid 1980's the HHS Administration set up an experimental HMO, one of four nationally, that was to address social services as well as medical services, called Elderplan. Wonderful idea except very difficult to put into practice. The very basic needs of people, companionship, trips to doctors appointments, food in the refrigerator, laundry, etc. were important but very limited social services were available and the money to provide such individual services seems out of reach anyway. Administrators of the Brooklyn Elderplan set up a Member to Member organization based on a Time Dollar model. Eventually recruiting over 100 workers and an overall membership in excess of 5,000.

In this plan the contradiction seems to be Member to Member and the fact that there were “workers” and “members.” All of the participants were members of the HMO. The workers were volunteers who tended to be healthier and more mobile. And efforts were made to provide service opportunities to the 5,000 members. One of the incentives for the “workers” to earn Time Dollars was that they could use them to pay for a portion of their HMO fee.

The relationship between Time Dollars and goods and services normally purchased with real money is a tricky one. In theory it's conceivable to imagine a system of service credits redeemable in service credits, in practice the Time Dollar programs of impinge on the real money world. This aspect of programs complicates matters. Before going into these complications let me provide a couple more examples of how some Time Dollar programs relate to real money issues.

In Chicago there is a program to distribute donated computers to school kids. Kids can earn a computer by providing peer tutoring. Parents or guardians have to get into the act too by attending the orientation meetings basically making it a family project. But in the end, the kids who end up providing twenty hours (I think) of peer tutoring get a computer.

MSF or Doctors without Boarders have used Time Dollar programs as well. The costs of AIDS antiretroviral treatments are great, so limited numbers of patients are able to be served. To deal with the dilemma of who gets treatment, MSF has in some areas made treatment eligibility contingent on participants serving as HIV educators.

In the USA one of the important complications of real money or commercial value involved with Time Dollar programs is the IRS. There is a body of laws dealing with commercial barter which basically says that barter is taxable income. But the IRS has carved out an exception. The exception turns on the contrast between commercial barter where parties are bound by contract and credits; barter serving as a cash substitute, and Time Dollar programs where people who receive a service has no legal obligation to repay and the people providing the service get no contractual right to compensation.

In Time Dollar programs people cannot go to court to demand services of anyone; these programs exist on mutual trust. Nevertheless the idea of mutual obligation or reciprocity is fundamental to programs. It's the feeling of “I can't let my friends down” that holds the programs together. The sense that “the reward of a good deed is a good deed.”

Not withstanding the IRS ruling, programs often run close to the line. Ithaca Dollars is one of the best examples of alternative currencies in the USA, but is distinct from Time Dollars. The program in Ithaca seems to me to cross the line IRS lines, but so far as I know the program hasn't got much flack from the Feds. All alternative currency programs and gift economy programs operate knowing that there is a limited exception and I suppose that all of them in one way or another will test the limits.

Most really good ideas can be stated succinctly, so it gives me some pause to know that it's hard to put Time Dollars in a few words. I participate in an online discussion forum about alternative currencies. When I broached the subject of Big Easy Dollars there my post was rather quickly dismissed. Most people are apparently interested mainly in replacing money we currently use with something different. I participate because I find the discussions interesting, but I should be clear that Big Easy Dollars is an idea for something that affects the economy only on the edges. The limitations are inherent, but something isn't nothing. Indeed the number of examples of successful programs using Time Dollars (service credits) demonstrates that they can be used to address a wide variety of needed services.

In Time Dollar experiments there have been state-wide efforts as well as numerous local initiatives. The areas devastated by the catastrophe as a result of Katrina cross numerous political divisions. There are many practical advantages for a single currency, prominent among the being that a host of services could be offered in exchange for Time Dollars. But the effort involved in such a large undertaking isn't going to come out of thin air— money doesn't grow on trees. What seems more realistic is that numerous small Time Dollar programs be initiated and perhaps a consortium of them form later under an umbrella organization.

There probably are only a limited number of good names and if past is precedent then people or organizations that don't intend to really use the names will probably own them. I thought Big Easy Dollars sounded good and I liked the sounds of Biloxi Bucks. Both really promise more than I envision immediately. But I think it's probably not a bad thing to go ahead and put the names out and use whatever sounds good.

Time Dollars can be useful to mobilize and coordinate community volunteers in the areas devastated. They can also be useful for the same for mobilizing and coordinating volunteer efforts outside those communities to help them.

People in affected communities will best know what their needs are, but on the other hand people are people and needs are predictable. The list of services that various Time Dollar programs provide is long, but not infinite. Most programs only provide a few services anyway. So I can envision people outside the affected communities thinking of services that will needed and organize to meet them including a Time Dollar component.

A need that came to mind was all of the libraries affected by this disaster. It took years to establish the collections and will take years to reestablish them. Meanwhile there are thousands of school kids who need those books now. An organization might be formed to collect books for distribution to agencies with literacy missions. Some volunteer efforts associated with this program outside New Orleans could be eligible to earn Big Easy Dollars.

So for example a library system might get a book mobile to take books to schools and other places where kids could borrow books. That library system might offer Big Easy Dollars to people who would go along and read to kids. The library might also team up with programs like meals on wheels so that people receiving meals might also get books and a reader if needed.

The people outside the service area who participated in the book collection activities and earned Big Easy Dollars might donate their dollars to the library who could then use some of those Big Easy Dollars to pay people reading to children and old people. In turn those people earning the Dollars might use those dollars to get services for themselves or family members.

It seems to me that collecting Big Easy Dollars might help motivate volunteers to use their time to provide services. Say, following up on the book idea, that a Baptist Church in Freedom, Pennsylvania thinks the need for books is something they want to participate in. After several hundred volunteer hours they've collected books and raised money to get them to the book repository. The group might decide to donate those Big Easy Dollars to a Baptist Church in New Orleans running a time dollar program. There is an appeal to the idea that the Time Dollars would act as a catalyst to encourage others offer their service in the hurricane affected areas. That not only will places be rebuilt but the community bonds strengthened.

A rather dull idea probably, but let me use it to go back to the point about names. If the Baptist Church in Pennsylvania uses the name “Big Easy Dollars” in it's campaign to collect books and it later turns out that Mike's Record Shop registers “Big Easy Dollars” as a trademark website or whatever, that doesn't suddenly make the Baptist Church's service credits valueless. Time Dollars are secured by trust, what they're called is important, but not intrinsic to their value.

It would be great if eventually service credits could be used for a wide variety of services, but immediately what's important is that they can be used for some services. Time Dollar programs can work as a very small initiative or very large ones. In this case it seems more likely that something big will emerge from numerous small initiatives. The future potential for cooperation among Time Dollar programs is motivating, but not essential to the success of an individual program.

I'm in a position of having no money to give to efforts to help. Since I'm a person who always has little money the distinction between a market and non-market economy that the IRS was able to discern with some effort, seems pretty obvious to me. What I've been trying to think of are ways that I can lend assistance over the long term that rebuilding will take. I'm also very concerned about the sense of community that needs repairing in the affected areas. There are many possible ways for the non-market economic transactions to play out, mostly these will be informal. There seems some advantage to the limited formality that Time Dollar programs lend to such efforts.

Alternative currencies based on time are not unique to Cahn. Here's an interesting article about American anarchist Josiah Warren and his experiment from 1827—1830 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinc...Time_Store And here's a little history about Ithaca Hours which are similar to Time Dollars, but not quite the same www.sustainer.org/dhm_archive/search.php LOL hope you don't feel that just because a link is there you have to visit it, but here's one about the Maine Time Dollar Network which is directly related to Cahn's idea www.mtdn.org/aboutmtdn.asp And here's the Time Dollar Web site www.timedollar.org/index.htm

Here are a couple of Web sites that are somewhat related. I include them because one of the topics of Time Dollars that I've glossed over is getting business people involved in providing services. Mouse Squad is a really good example of that. www.mousesquad.org/
www.uwnyc.org/technews/v6_n5_a1.html