Time Networks are designed to include everyone, regardless of age, race, religion, ability or gender, to play an active part in the life of their community. The ethos on which they are built states that sharing our humanity by giving time to our local community should be as much a part of modern day life as watching TV or listening to music. Both models use popular culture as a currency to build new membership led social networks by underwriting active citizenship with time accessed social events, educational and cultural activities.
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.
TO PREVIEW THE TIME FOR COMMUNITIES DOCUMENT, CLICK THE LINK BELOW:
userfiles/Time for Communities.pdf
The Creation Development Trust has been running Time Network at the Blaengarw Workingmen’s Hall. The project works on the simple principle that for every hour of time that a member gives to the Centre they can take an hour back from the Centre by attending a wide range of time-entry social events, including concerts, theatre, cinema and other nights out events The model recognizes that communities are full of unused skills, talents, knowledge, experience and abilities, and has the potential to transform the culture of volunteering in the 21st century.
“The voluntary sector makes a huge contribution to the quality of life in communities across Wales. Creation Development Trust Ltd’s Timecentre initiative, indeed sounds like a classic example of the kind of innovative approach to volunteering that the voluntary sector is famous for. It would be difficult for a local authority, or for our departments of Government, to come up with such a scheme. However, that is exactly what voluntary sector bodies can do and what we cannot do. They can come up with bright ideas and be flexible, and we want to see the richness that we have in Wales across the board in the voluntary sector maintained in order to encourage more such creative ideas”
The First Minister Rhodri Morgan,
The National Assembly for Wales
TO PREVIEW THE BLAENGARW TIME CENTRE BOOKLET, CLICK THE LINK BELOW: