Who attended?

Reps from 22 London Time Banks plus 2 organisations interested in timebanking (Sense and Voluntary Action Islington)

Kaaren Morris, Broadway TB upperstreettimebank@blueyonder.co.uk
Priti Pedersen, Upper Street & Highbury TB pritinorfall@hotmail.com & highburytime@live.co.uk
Anna Ware, LB Camden Anna.ware@camden.gov.uk
Mary Stevens, Highbury TB (new) maryistevens@googlemail.com
Mable Kong-Rawlinson, LB Camden Mable.kong-rawlinson@camden.gov.uk
Tina, Hourbank, Peckham hourbank@peckhamsettlement.org.uk
Alison Paule, Paxton Green Time Bank Alison@pgtimebank.org
Kim Morressey, West Euston TB
Q – Richmond Time Bank Dolphins569@yahoo.co.uk
Gemma McGrath, Hackney Wick TB Gemma.mcgrath@familymosaic.co.uk
Emma Mold, Sense emma.mold@sense.org.uk
Charmaine Jacobs, Rushey Green TB charmaine@rgtb.org.uk
Milleshar Aggrey, Bellingham Youth TB Milleshar.aggery@lewisham.gov.uk
John Garces, St Lukes Time Bank/Caxton Hse timebank@caxtonhouse.org & timebank@slpt.org.uk
Kirsty Burns, Hilldrop/Caledonian Road TB kirstyburns@gmail.com
Viola Etienne, Rushey Green TB viola@rgtb.org.uk
Sam Leggatt, Haringey TB Sam.leggatt@groundwork.org.uk
Andre Peters, My Time Your Time apeters@hexagon.org.uk
Kamran, My Time Your Time
Chris Swift, Marylebone TB c.swift@churcharmy.co.uk
Peter Roberts, Mildmay TB mildmaytimebank@btconnect.com
Bridget Morris, Voluntary Action Islington bridget.morris@vai.org.uk
Richard Ollerearnshaw, Tower Hamlets renotron@hotmail.com
Selma Piro, new TB in Tower Hamlets selmapiro@hotmail.com
Clare Davies, Origin in Camden TB Clare.davies@origingroup.org.uk
Lisa Lewis, Origin in Camden TB
Martin Simon, TBUK martin@timebanks.co.uk
Sarah Bird, TBUK sarahb@timebanks.co.uk
Ian Toplis, TBUK ian@timebanks.co.uk
David Hogarth Hogarth@hogarthrep.fsnet.co.uk

AGM
Everyone is very welcome to come along our Glastonbury AGM and social weekend in July (22nd/23rd/24th). This is a free event including camping, tour of the TOR, music night on Friday……and lots more……lovely food available at low cost and bring and share. Please book places with ian@timebanks.co.uk ASAP!!!

Your Money or Your Life: Time for Both – by Martin Simon
Martin handed out an extract from his book with a request for everyone to support it by making a small pledge at http://www.buzzbank.org/timebanking to help pay for the publishing and marketing. Pledge £10 now and you will get a free copy of the book when it is published worth £12.50. ‘Crowd Funding’ in this way means that all the income from book sales will go towards helping to make the changes in society that we all want to see happen rather than line the pockets of commercial publishers.

TBUK update
Martin Simon spoke of some of the changes in Timebanking UK, including his job! Now changing from Chief Executive to Founding Advisor.
Ian Toplis introduced himself as taking over from Sarah Kaslova who has had a lovely baby boy on 21st June. Sarah Bird will be Projects Manager from 1st September with Nicki remaining with the accounts department.
The Russians are here
Martin asked people to let him know if they wanted to meet 2 people who are running timebanking in Russia on 13 July as they will be in London visiting for the day.
Dispatches
We are preparing a pitch for a TV programme on Channel 4 about how timebanking can help deliver the Big Society.
Big Society
New government programme to turn us all into social activists will include training 5,000 community organisers. Martin is meeting Nat Wei, the lead person, on Tuesday.
Martin spoke of the government reforming commissioning again and Peter Roberts has offered to put the nef info onto the yahoo e-group.
Martin will be meeting Prof. Martin Knapp at the London School of Economics to discuss what economic pay-offs there might be for timebanking? Please send any examples of how timebanking has actually saved money in the long run to Martin before 16th July.
He spoke about working with the Department for Work and Pensions on the “Dig Deep” project where they asked people over 60 about what they want and many suggested timebanking. They have offered the possibility some small grants of £1000 to be given out in October and spent by April. There were many suggestions about how this money could be spent:
• Projects such as gardening, cooking, social get togethers
• IT for the over 55’s with the tutor being a young person to achieve some intergenerational linking
• Drop-in sessions, internet café
• Training voluntary organisations and community projects to use timebanking for older people
• Training people to run a time bank working with older people
• Don’t spend it on new time banks, but as an add-on project.
• Paying insurance premiums

AND FINALLY MARTIN ASKED EVERYONE TO HELP CREATE A REAL TIMEBANKING “BUZZ” NATIONALLY BY SIGNING UP TO FOLLOW TIMEBANKING TWEETS AT http://twitter.com/TBUKMartin
WE CANNOT DO IT WITHOUT YOU – WE NEED EVERYONE TO SIGN UP NOW SO PLEASE DO – WE CAN GET TO MILLIONS OF INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE IF WE ALL JOIN TOGETHER AND PRMOTE TIMEBANKING THROUGH TWITTERING AWAY AT LEAST ONCE A DAY – IT ONLY TAKES A FEW MINUTES!

INSURANCE
Lawrence from Fairshares sent his apologies. He was due to talk about timebanking insurance but could not make it to this hub meeting. He will however, be at the next one.

NEWSLETTER
Sarah B gave everyone a copy of the latest London Network time bank newsletter – please see attached for your copy.

BROKER SAFETY
Unfortunately Vanessa Gould could not attend the hub meeting, so we will postpone this topic for the next hub meeting.

National Indicators – presented by David Hogarth

David reminded everyone of our report on National Indicators which could be a way to approach your local council for funding. He said that all Social Services Departments have to work to reaching either national or local indicators. He spoke of how they measured the key performance indicators by means of a traffic light system. And that this could be a way that timebanking could approach councils saying that timebanking could help achieve the red lights where they were failing.
Benefits of Cuts
David’s council is Westminster and he said that they have to save £25 million a year and will get £90 million less this year than they thought. Day centres will have to close and they will lose the ‘moderate’ level of assessing people (keeping the ‘critical’ and ‘substantial’ levels). He felt that this could also be an opportunity for timebanking to show that we can involve those who come under the ‘moderate’ category.
Scrutiny Committee
He advised everyone to go along to their local Scrutiny Committee as it may be that you are the only ‘public’ person. He said that senior people will go and that this is a key audience to talk to about timebanking and how you can help.
David gave a handout listing outcomes, some very relevant to timebanking (attached).

There was some discussion about the new government placing more emphasis on local councils setting their own targets and potentally phasing out Local Area Agreements (LAAs).

The advice was to visit the council and suggest that timebanking should be incorporated into their local targets.

Eco Stars Time Bank – time to roll it out across London
Simon Ghartey has been developing a new time bank in Brixton with his group of young people aged between 15 and 19.
As part of the funding agreement we shall be expanding the group’s activities to other Borough’s in London.
What do Eco Stars do?
They have been involved in gardening projects, landscaping, planning and design (sensory gardens, community gardens etc), artwork and murals. They have been working with businesses, schools and youth groups in their borough and also in adjacent boroughs. The team have involved around 180 people in their work so far and have had media coverage as far as Milan! To check out some of their work, have a look at their Facebook page. Just type in Eco Stars to search for their page.
Are you interested in being part of this with young people in your area/time bank?
If so, can you email Sarah Bird at sarahb@timebanks.co.uk with the following information?
• Who and how many young people may want to get involved
• Where the project will happen and a brief outline of what you would like to achieve
• What resources you have, if any to assist with the development of the project

The Eco Stars will offer:
• An initial meeting to write a project plan and agree a timeline
• They will provide at least 3 visits to oversee the work
• They will provide consultation and advice sessions

At the end of the year we would be looking for you to have involved 20 young people.

QUESTION / ANSWER SESSION

Involving Diverse Communities There were questions about ways to involve people from very diverse communities where English is often not the first language. Suggestions were to have group activities based around art, sport and food where those involved do not have to talk too much! Use existing members to teach new comers and those with less English language skills.

Negative References One dilemma posed to the group was around negative references that may be returned to the time bank. Most people felt that a person should not be excluded from the time bank, but that alternative activities are found that will suit the person, maybe in a group . Another comment was that sometimes a negative reference could be someone with a grudge. Many felt that the issue should be openly discussed with the time bank member about how to move forward.

Setting Benchmarks Another subject was that of setting benchmarks and being able to assess the impact of your time bank. Timebanking UK strongly urge time banks to use questionnaires such as the nef one to measure health and wellbeing, and also the questionnaire to measure co-production. Both of these can be found on the Timebanking UK website http://www.timebanking.org

NEXT HUB MEETING
We plan to hold the next hub meeting in October. Could you help host it with a room big enough for around 50 people with some space for lunch?

Sarah Bird
sarahb@timebanks.co.uk

I can’t imagine the project will be able to move back for at least a year but everything should be safe – if a little shaded – in the Bronte Sisters’ communal garden on Matthias Road until then.

From: Sarah Bird [mailto:sarahb@timebanks.co.uk]
Sent: 18 February 2010 11:45
To: Mildmay TB
Subject: RE: brokertraining

Hi Peter

Yes, the agreement was to originally have it free (for time credits) but when I had 60 replies from people wanting to attend, Martin said we would need to charge as we have to now put on a second session to cope with the numbers. I tried to explain to everyone as and when they expressed an interest and we did offer bursaries for those in a voluntary role or who had no funding available at all.

It’s been a pain in the neck to be honest – wish I’d known from the start as I certainly would not have said it was free if I knew of a chance that we would have to charge.

Sarah Bird
Timebanking UK
Tel personal mobile 0777 5936 333
Landline 01752 769638
Alternative email sarahbird7@yahoo.co.uk

________________________________
From: Mildmay TB [mildmaytimebank@btconnect.com]
Sent: 18 February 2010 11:36
To: Sarah Bird
Cc: ‘Kaaren Morris’; ‘Priti Louise Norfall’; Sarah Kazlova
Subject: FW: brokertraining

Sarah

I was a wee bit surprised that you have decided to charge people for this training but not advised any of the London time banks. The message I copied and placed up on our website stated that “the charge per person will be in time credits.” Good job I didn’t relay it out on our other networks!

I’ll cover the £40 fee for Priti from the Islington Time Banks Network’s training budget. Priti is free on 25th / 26th and those days are preferred. A cheque will go off to TBUK a.s.a.p. / as soon as we’ve have two signatories visit.

Best.

Peter

Forget my suggestion that this could have been designed by a bunch of right-wing economists. Any Economist would have heard of alternative currencies. I imagine a great many Economists actually know all about time banking and that time credits can never be a complementary currency. Any Anthropologist would know all about Reciprocity. There are bound to be many other fields that overlap.

You are quite right that this looks like an example of desk research – but however it was done it was clearly by people who have very little knowledge of the area they’re ‘researching’.

They should have asked some children. Just as all children understand Fairtrade in about 10 seconds; all children understand Tit for Tat, Give and Take, Fairness, etc.

How they came to their conclusions in this informative piece of literature is classified as “desk research” (making it up?!) and in response to us asking them if they’d talked to anyone about timebanking, their reply was: “we did this as a piece of secondary research and the brief did not require us to talk to anyone in the relevant professions”

Errrm, does that not sound a bit odd? Adding to the argument that they must have spent all the money the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills gave them to produce this on doughnuts and then hurridly churned out this at 4.30 on a Friday.

http://fastfuture.com/?p=129

The description of how a future private sector time bank Broker might operate – if you remove everything that’s unique about time banking – appears on page 39:

QUOTE

18. Time Broker / Time Bank Trader

Alternative currencies will evolve their own markets – for example time banking already exists. Time Banks are community exchanges that enable individuals to earn time credits for performing services for the community and spend those credits on buying services from other community members.

Emergence as a Profession: 2010 – A Day in the Life

Most members of a time banking community will simply seek to earn time credit for performing services e.g. washing someone‘s car. They will then spend the credits earned on purchasing services from other time bank members – e.g. having someone paint your home. Others may seek to become Time Brokers and profit by running a time banking exchange and providing the matching service between providers and users of services. So for example, a buyer may pay ten time credits for someone to walk their dog, the dog walker in turn receives nine time credits, with the time bank broker taking one credit as profit. Their accumulated profits can then be used to purchase services within the community.

The time broker‘s day would be spent arranging transactions, suggesting a value to put on new services, vetting potential new members of the time exchange and resolving disputes between buyers and sellers. The community element of time banks will require a strong focus on encouraging dialogue between members and profiling case examples of the kinds of time exchanges taking place.

A time bank trader may operate within a time banking community, buying and selling time credits – possibly for hard currency. A notional exchange rate would be established so, for example, a time credit could be brought for one pound and sold for 95 pence. Buyers might be willing to purchase time credits for hard currency if they think that services can be purchased more cheaply that way. If the going rate to have your lawn mowed is ten pounds and the service is on offer for eight time credits, it would be worth your while buying credits from a time broker. The time broker will make their profits on the differences between the buying and selling price for time credits.

UNQUOTE