globalbriefs
News and resources to inspire concerned citizens to work together in building a healthier, stronger society that benefits all.
November is Native American Heritage Month.
NativeAmericanHeritageMonth.gov lists celebrations.
Community Currency Private Mints on the Upswing
A local currency movement is again emerging as a way to focus business capital, especially consumer spending, on community economies. BerkShares illustrate the phenomenon. First issued in 2006 in the southern Berkshires region of Massachusetts, more than 2 million of these paper notes are currently in circulation. One hundred BerkShares can be purchased for $95 at one of five local banks and exchanged at partici- pating merchants with the same purchasing value as U.S. dollars. The program provides consumers an incentive to keep
the notes active and shop and dine locally in the 400 neighborhood businesses that accept them. “At the moment, we’re a very sophisticated ‘buy local’ program,” says Susan Witt, co-founder and administrator of BerkShares, Inc., “but the poten- tial to move to an independent currency is built in.” Networking is key. Some local currency success stories include New York’s Ithaca Hours, North Carolina’s Plenty and Wisconsin’s Madison Hours, but others have not survived, despite sometimes extensive marketing support. BerkShares continue to represent a relatively small part of the region’s local
economy. Witt says: “In the short term, it’s about educating people about local economies. In the long term, it’s transforming the institution of money. We’re not there yet. But everyone knows what BerkShares are.”
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26 Westchester/Putnam NY Edition
Banking Freedom Loan Alternatives Emerging
Worldwide
Borrow- ing from a bank has traditionally been a slow, bureaucratic process, often off-limits to people out- side the wage-and-salary mainstream, whether they’re starting a business or getting back on their feet. Over the cen- turies, groups of people have organized various styles of societal credit arrange- ments to address these shortcomings. Today’s credit union, a co-operative, community-based banking model, still thrives.
In the past 30 years, the rise of mi- crocredit has been providing small loans to people around the world that have no access to traditional banks or could not meet banking industry requirements. More recently, the combination of microfinance and online social network- ing has resulted in a new phenomenon: peer-to-peer lending, or social lending. Today, more than a dozen websites
connect borrowers and lenders without using banks as middlemen. The eco- nomic advantage of such peer-to-peer lending extends to attractive interest rates for borrowers; often half that of Visa or MasterCard.
LendingClub.com has surpassed $1 billion in such loans. “Interest rates turn a charitable re- lationship into a business relationship,” notes Matt Flannery, who founded the online micro-lender
Kiva.org in 2005. “That empowers the poor by making them business partners.” Kiva lenders don’t earn interest on their loans, but the underlying micro-lenders that adminis- ter the loans in their countries do.
Sources: Ode magazine,
MainStreet.com
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