Community Arts
BRINGING CULTURE BACK HOME
The Time Network methodology for building positive social capital, measured by increased active citizenship, adopts the 'culture of mutualism' in currency form. It is important to recognise that these are not new ideas simply a reconstruction of mutualism – citizens and agencies working together.
Mutualism was the engine of change that redefined Welsh communities in the early 20th century. In 1924 Aneurin Bevan and a circle of friends presided over a range of unprecedented activity in Tredegar that outstripped the rest of South Wales. In Tredegar, a depressed disadvantaged industrial town, activities proliferated, big and small, from dance to amateur dramatics, street carnivals to sport days, choral meetings, regular evening lectures, cinemas showing films from Europe and America, and an array of visiting speakers. This culture was inclusive, celebrating the values of communitarianism, providing opportunity for people to express their humanity in the places they live. It was a culture that spoke loud against the dehumanisation of people in the name of any abstraction or ideology.
This culture is not dead history; it is the bedrock for rebuilding communities in the 21st century. The DNA of time currency is the DNA of mutualism.
By using time as a standard of value, the currency works on the simple premise that for each hour a person gives to building civil society they receive one time credit. Credits are used to access educational, social and cultural events on a pro rata hourly basis. Culture is once again the driver for regeneration.
Currency is a human artefact, an invention of value with no special preserve. In the same way that traditional currency values commercial exchanges, civil currency values communitarian exchanges. By making mutualism visible in currency form people subscribe to a set of values, to a network that bridges coherence across diversity, to a membership, to a place of belonging.
Case Study
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