Financial services and markets

Here's a story about how members of the Changemakers community are developing creative approaches to finance across the globe:

How would you like to be able to move house—packing, transportation, cleaning, moving materials removal, and gardening included—without spending a dollar? If you lived in New South Wales, Australia, you could use shells, issued in points, to pay for everything but the gardening, which you would pay for with time.

This may sound wacky, but it is a hypothetical example of how three well-established alternative currency systems, the Local Exchange Trading System (LETS), Time Banks, and Community Exchange System (CES) allow users to get what they need when they join communities that use alternative or complementary currencies.

Read more about this solution, or discuss this topic below.