Wine-making, Chicken Wrangling, Bee-keeping, Solar-Cooking,
Medicinal Herb Growing, Bike-Powered Machines, Rainwater
Catchment, Oyster Mushroom Cultivation, Cob Ovens, & more!
Over 40 Workshops, Live Music & Silent Auction!
Read More5.02.12 | Yael Chanoff| from the SF Bay Guardian
The economy had collapsed. Mira Luna became ill with Lyme disease, lost her job, and then gotten buried under a mountain of medical bills. She went into bankruptcy. But it wasn’t more money she longed for — it was community. Read more here.
Hack with us at Creative Currency April 27-29 in SF. Creative Currency is an initiative bringing together leading developers and designers with national experts in social finance, local currencies, crowdfunding, sharing platforms, and other leaders of the new economy to envision, prototype, and deploy innovative solutions that reimagine our systems of exchange from the ground up.
How can local currencies support local businesses and community organizations? How can sharing platforms be tailored to fit the needs of under-served communities? How can tools like crowdfunding and microcredit be put to work for social service organizations and individuals alike?
More than a typical hackathon, Collaboration Weekend is the first
Read MoreBy Mira Luna
03.28.12
This is a story about how my cat finally came home, because my community built a home for her without money.
A few years ago I had to find a temporary home for my cat, Cleo. This is a story about how my cat finally came home, because my community built a home for her without money.
About four years ago I became ill around the time I lost my job as the economy tanked. Fortunately, my best friend took Cleo on her farm in Oregon and she’s been living there happily ever since. Late last year my partner and I created a cat-friendly housing collective and moved in together. I wanted to bring Cleo home from the farm, but she needed to be outside of our new house during the day in order for everyone in the house to be happy.
It became clear that we had to build a dwelling for Cleo before she could come home. I wanted to find out if it was possible to build a sustainable cat house without money since I don’t have much. Plus,
Read MoreFrom Our Kingdom
Brett Scott, 16 March 2012
Several weeks ago I sat in a pub with someone from, what I’d call, ‘the confrontational Left’. He was caught up in passionate indignation at the injustice of the financial sector, highly eloquent at providing a persuasive diagnosis of the flaws of the system that he perceived. His language was phrased in terms of rebellion.
The next day I sat at a financial innovation conference, at a table with entrepreneurs. Their focus was on the very real potential to challenge financial incumbents via ‘disruptive’ financial technologies such as peer-to-peer finance ↑ and complementary currencies ↑ . Their language was phrased in terms of creativity.
In general, there is limited crossover between those focused on stirring intellectual dissent via alternative ‘heterodox’ economics ↑ , and those who are involved in practical financial innovation. A more
Read MoreFrom Shareable.net
By Neal Gorenflo
03.27.12
It’s an important day in the sharing economy.Mayor Edwin M. Lee of San Franciso announced today the formation of The Sharing Economy Working Group, the first of its kind in the U.S. and perhaps in the world. The purpose of the working group, “is to take a comprehensive look at the economic benefits, innovative companies and emerging policy issues around the growing ‘sharing economy’”. This could catalyze other cities to take similar action.
Read the article here.
Today is World Water Day, and the entire Important Media network is celebrating with posts dedicated to this most essential of liquids. Check out all the posts from across the network on our sister site, Eat. Drink. Better!
International World Water Day is held annually on March 22nd as a means of focusing attention on the importance of freshwater and advocating for the sustainable management of freshwater resources. There are 7 billion people who need clean, affordable drinking water on our planet,
Read MoreGabriel Hetland and Abigail N. Martin
From the Nation
March 15, 2012
Despite worries that the Occupy movement would not survive the winter, activists continue to highlight ordinary Americans’ frustration with the dysfunction of “the world’s largest democracy.” In January, “Occupy Congress” descended upon Capitol Hill, and in early March students across California organized to “Occupy the Capitol” in Sacramento. But Occupy has done more than just highlight the inadequacies of American-style representative democracy. It is giving direct, participatory forms of democracy, like the General Assembly model, a new lease on life. So far, Occupy’s participatory democratic decision-making has been confined to public spaces outside the halls of government power. The question for Occupy is, can the movement bring participatory democracy
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More than 36 percent of adult respondents said that if gas prices continue to rise, they’ll have to give something up in order to afford their car. Of those who regularly drive a vehicle, nearly one-in-four (23 percent) said it is at least somewhat likely that they will build up credit card debt to pay for gas in the upcoming months. Households with children (29 percent) are significantly more likely than those without children (19 percent) to indicate this.
When asked what they likely will do to better afford to drive a vehicle due to rising gas prices, survey takers said the following:
Technology has become so entrenched in our society that’s it’s almost hard to remember a time when we didn’t depend on these gadgets and gizmos to get us through the day. We’ll save the debate on whether that’s a good or bad thing for another day. What we can say with confidence, however, is that today’s children will work and play in environments surrounded by technology. Understanding, using, and most importantly, knowing how to build these technologies will be a requirement for future generations.
The problems is that the gap between those who have access to the ever-changing world of new technologies and those
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What: A festival to help educate, inspire and spread sustainable living and self-sufficiency skills. (Habra traduccion en Espanol)
When: Sat, May 26th from 10-6
Where: Hayes Valley Farm, 450 Laguna Street, San Francisco, CA 94102
Why: To make low-cost, sustainable city living accessible to all different kinds of people and jump start the transition to a more Earth-harmonious culture. To realize the potential of the Timebank to assist in skill-sharing.
Who: The BACE Timebank,
Tomorrow night, Wednesday, March 14, is the Timebank’s monthly board meeting. It is always at 8pm on the 2nd Wednesday of every month at Noisebridge, 2169 Mission St (b/w 18th and 17th). The board meeting is open to whoever wants to come.
That said, we have lots of work to plow through, and if you are new to the Timebank and have general questions about how it works, it might be sorta boring. We always have a board member there at 7:30pm who does a general info session. That’s geared for new folks who want to learn more who might be bored by the general board meeting.
TL;DR: board meeting Wednesday night at 8pm, info session for newbies at 7:30pm, both open to all.
Here’s the link to the meetup event if that’s your thing.
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Climate change and the need to “go green” are topics constantly in the news. Solar panels line the roofs of your neighborhood and wind turbines have begun to dot the suburban landscape. Americans are demanding change and they want it now. Waiting for the government to do something could take forever, so it’s time to take the bull by the horns.
In conjunction with the Million Car Carbon Campaign (MCCC), I’ve put together a list suggestions
Read MoreThe Monthly profiled East Bay sharing systems called Dare to Share. I dare you to read it.
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The BACE Timebank <3 Biketopia, a nonprofit bike kitchen / bike shop hybrid started by SF Bike Kitchen volunteer Zach Cohen. You can get your bike fixed by professional mechanics or learn how to do it yourself. Biketopia also has a youth training program that works with local youth organizations to teach kids how to fix bikes. You can use your Timebank hours to get your bike fixed! Check out this Ecolocalizer article about Biketopia for more info.
Read MoreMira Luna, a Timebank board member, wrote this rad article about bike kitchens near and far, including Timebank faves the SF Bike Kitchen and Biketopia, both of which accept Timebank hours 
Shareable.net published a story about the Timebank Holiday Fair. Check it out. If you came and have feedback, please leave it in the comments.
April 24th, 2012 8am-6pm
San Francisco, CA.
We are inviting innovators to converge on April 24 in The Bay Area for the 2012 unMoney Convergence to engage in an evolutionary conversation on money. In the wake of the financial crises around the world, new approaches are emerging in the ways that currency moves and property is held. We invite you to these explorations.
Our goal is to bring foster dialogue and collaboration among the range of interesting emerging ideas around money and exchange systems and to explore connections with issues of land and property tenure. In addition to topics on alternatives to the current currency systems, we invite all who are looking at new ways to look at land tenancy and stewardship, hard currency versus energy, time and food based currencies. We are looking for synergies between folks who see the need for more grounded, materially based economics and those looking at the
From SELC
March 8, 2012
Faced with regulatory and financial barriers to accessing mainstream investment capital, many entrepreneurs have turned to crowdfunding platforms such as KickStarter and IndieGoGo to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations. These small-dollar donations demonstrate that regular non-wealthy folks want to support local entrepreneurs in their community. If entrepreneurs could also offer investment opportunities to the crowdfunding “crowd”, they could potentially access millions of dollars of investments from their communities and networks that already support their businesses, without the financial and logistical challenges of regular securities registration.
H.R. 2930, the Entrepreneur Access to Capital Act, which would exempt crowdfunded investments from state and federal securities registration, introduced by Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) overwhelmingly passed the House last
Read MoreBy Mira Luna
02.14.12
From Shareable.net
I like to think of utopia as the space where idealism meets reality. Over the years, I have found few radical social change projects that met reality without failure or conflict, especially within a capitalist economy. Transformative projects often fail to take off and end up disillusioning their founders and volunteers. The Bike Kitchen model is one of those unique exceptions that we can try to learn from.
The first time I visited the San Francisco Bike Kitchen, I was struck by the seemingly limitless energy – it was bursting at the seams with volunteers and clients waiting to work on their own bikes. As other local nonprofits and business are struggling or closing up shop, I wondered what makes this model different.
Bike Kitchens have been around since the 1980s, and the earliest recorded one was in Austria. There is little documentation about how
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