GoodBank - A bank built by and for social benefit businesses and their conscious consumers
Location
GoodBank uses social affinity group, geospatial and product lifecycle transparency technologies to reconnect community wealth (savings, buying power, concern and pride), thus consciously aiming social impacts at
- growing sustainable businesses,
- reversing threats to fragile bioregions and
- lifting up people of ordinary and greatest need.
About You
Location
Project Street Address
Project City
Project Province/State
Project Postal/Zip Code
Project Country
Your idea
Year initiative/program began:
2007
Field of work
Banking/Financial Services
If Field of Work is "Other" please define in 1-2 words below (and explain in detail in the entry form):
Service / Activity focus (If "other" please explain in entry form)
Technology
Year organization founded (yyyy)
2007
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Project URL
Positioning of your initiative on the Mosaic of Solutions™ diagram:
Which of these barriers is the primary focus of your work?
Social benefit businesses not deemed investment worthy
Which of the principles is the primary focus of your work?
Leverage the stake individuals have in financial success of the group
If you believe some other barrier or principle should be included in the mosaic, please describe it and how it would affect the positioning of your initiative in the mosaic
Social benefit businesses (and the social sector itself) lack an "output measure," akin to GDP: Gross Domestic Product, ROI: Return on Investment or P/E: Price Earnings Ratios. The social sector's participants lack "marginal collaborative quality and impactfulness" scores, akin to FICO credit scores, so to help funders and potential project partners assess the true worth of social enterprises in their context of addressing regional challenges.
GoodBank will use a composite regional quality of life measure (sustainable resiliency®), to
a) map the impacts that bank customers collectively trigger on environmental, energy, infrastructure, public health and social issues of universal concern, and
b) through interest rate discounts and cash-back rewards, create financial incentives for those proactively building sustainable resiliency®.
Without a standardized output measure of gaps that the social sector is addressing regionally, and how the gaps offer leverage to social entrepreneurs, stovepipes of nonprofit, academic, government and private sector consulting organizations will
- slow response to social issues,
- avoid collaborative success,
- continue to rely on inefficient and unreliable annual grant funding and
- destroy the potential for substantial market financing through a social capital market that measures success through an enabling taxonomy of needs, indigenous options and social entrepreneurs.
Sustainable resiliency® is designed as an open platform meta-model of existing ratings. Like a mashup of Wikipedia and Google Earth, to fuse expert knowledge in place-aware context, it will generate a picture of gaps in need, capacities to fill those needs and money that could be leveraged to match needs to capacities in real time.
Once GoodBank uses sustainable resiliency® as an impact measure for underwriting purposes, the methodology will become immediately consequential and viable for other financial innovators in the social sector. GoodBank plans to cross-license its technologies to other financial institutions and innovators serving the social sector space.
Name Your Project
GoodBank - A bank built by and for social benefit businesses and their conscious consumers
Describe Your Idea
GoodBank uses social affinity group, geospatial and product lifecycle transparency technologies to reconnect community wealth (savings, buying power, concern and pride), thus consciously aiming social impacts at
- growing sustainable businesses,
- reversing threats to fragile bioregions and
- lifting up people of ordinary and greatest need.
Innovation
What is your signature innovation, your new idea, in one sentence?
GoodBank uses social affinity group, geospatial and product lifecycle transparency technologies to reconnect community wealth (savings, buying power, concern and pride), thus consciously aiming social impacts at
- growing sustainable businesses,
- reversing threats to fragile bioregions and
- lifting up people of ordinary and greatest need.
Describe what makes your idea unique—different from all others in the field.
The banking sector is highly competitive, reacting to the most recent headline or crisis. Patriotic after 9/11, then "eco-friendly" in response to climate change, the "Inconvenient Truth" of banking in America is that it is a broken and destructive system, destroying lives, wealth and communities.
Wall Street's lack of impact transparency has cost innocent taxpayers billions, while
- compromising intergenerational family finance and security, and the safety and soundness of our banking and insurance markets,
- wiping away investors' historic equity in AIG, Countrywide, IndyMac, Lehman, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, SunTrust, Wachovia and Washington Mutual,
- threatening a steamroller of cascading global financial defaults and capital evaporation, and
- chilling the market for financing businesses offering innovations in social benefits, and trying to bring conscious consumerism to the current generation of Web-ad-frenzied, credit-addicted customers.
GoodBank takes an entirely out-of-the-box approach. Transparency, impactful transparency.
Instead of hiding how we make lending decisions, we state them and give consumers as "open source" the same data and calculators we use to set interest rates.
Instead of tearing customers' financial lives into securitizable vertical pieces, one loan program at a time, we treat people holistically as they use our credit card, car, business, home or other loans, or save and invest intergenerational wealth.
Instead of destroying communities with predatory lending, we measure and reward the social benefits our customers and loans create in their community.
Instead of cash-back rewards that buy useless gadgets from a catalogue of outdated electronics, we ask our customers to shop and invest in their environmental and social goals, thus using our cash-back rewards as complementary currency to create capital for social entrepreneurs in for-profits and non-profits globally.
Instead of the "gotcha" game of relying on consumer inertia to earn fees at default interest rates (that threaten consumer FICO scores), we foster social financial literacy, and send email and text alerts as reminders to be proactive: to pay bills, update savings and borrowing plans, reset payment plans at affordable levels and find smarter ways to live well while doing good.
How do you implement your innovation and apply it to the challenge/problem you are addressing?
GoodBank will unleash new tools to measure, advocate and transact regional social impacts (including environmental, equal justice, public health and other subsets of social causes and concerns).
Our core technologies – sustainable resiliency® and the Means Meter® - will reward customers’ positive social impacts with lower interest rates and greater cash-back rewards. A portion of the cash-back rewards will be payable as demurrage, declining in value unless spent promptly on social sector investments and nonprofit donations. Our 1% Profit to the Planet pledge will grow social capital funding through GoodBank's foundation. Through minimum deposit evergreen savings accounts, we assure our savers will earn an interest rate within 5% of the top rates available from leading banks. In the second year of operations, we will begin licensing our social impacts financial technologies to other banks, thereby growing the global options for ethical finance.
Through its mix of innovations, GoodBank will provide more certain and larger streams of capital and customers to social benefit businesses, non-profits and governments.
Do you have any existing partnerships, and if so, how did you create them?
We have a number of strategic partners.
As an Ashoka Fellow, I am enriched by a network of 2,000 social entrepreneurs in 60 countries with vast experience in social capital market innovation.
Weil Gotshal & Manges, the international law firm known for innovations in social finance, has adopted GoodBank as a pro bono project, significantly reducing the legal fees for chartering our social sector bank.
IDEO, the Silicon Valley icon of functional design, is providing their expertise to brainstorm ways that GoodBank's physical bank branches and online web services can offer creative innovations in conscious consumer and socially-responsible business banking.
In which sector do these partners work? (Check all that apply)
Citizen sector (nonprofits, NGOs) , Private sector , Public sector (government).
Impact
Provide one sentence describing your impact/intended impact.
We expand affordable capital access for the social sector through conscious consumers and the businesses they trust.
Please list any other measures of the impact of your innovation.
"Transparency" and "accountability" will define our competitive advantage as an ethical bank.
As a regional impactfulness score, sustainable resiliency® will be the main metric GoodBank will publish to answer “Did we improve the regions that our transactions touched?”
Likewise, GoodBank's Means Meter® metrics will show how our conscious consumers are living healthier, while improving regional and planetary impacts of global economic activity.
Our procurement visualization tools will capture new government and corporate revenues for social businesses. For comparability with other financial institutions, our CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) reports will be reported in GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) and other widely adopted standardized formats.
Our map of foreign aid and investment flows will let social businesses tap global expansion funding, and connect with each other.
Most banks make money through their retail customers' sheer laziness, inertia, and not wanting to make a change. We will educate our customers on market interest rates, as part of showing GoodBank's competitive rates through its ethical bank paradigm of growing social financial literacy. Rather than earning fees by relying on customers' late payments (traditional banks' game of "gotcha"), we will email reminder notices of payments about to be late (much like libraries send reminders to assure its books recirculate). We will publish how much our credit users save (and how much their credit scores were protected) so as to empower depositors to become increasingly proactive in managing personal credit.
Does your innovation address and/or change banking regulations?
Today, banks are roiling in bad real estate loans that assumed perennial housing price increases domestically. Loan losses in the billions have drained capital access from social sector businesses and non-profits. Major commercial and investment banks have closed and seen huge downgrades in their debt, debt-swap and equity ratings. Bank sector stocks have declined drastically. The U.S. Treasury, Federal Reserve and state bank regulators lack transparency reports and models robust enough to detect regional bank loan impacts that may endanger local economic activity and threaten sustainable growth.
GoodBank will extend the SEC's implementation of eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) framework by adding spatial tags and regional impacts. Location-aware XBRL can leverage the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) effort of bank regulators and global banks, so as to make banks and their corporate borrowers more accountable locally.
Likewise, we would seek CDFI: Community Development Financial Institution status by reason of bank operations dedicated to actively lending in under-served communities. This requested interpretation of CDFI rules may open the door for bank regulatory transparency to take better account of "bottom of the pyramid" impacts, credit scoring and market expansion opportunities. There we aim to grow conscious consumerism, social financial literacy and community social impacts underwriting technologies available online, through the mobile phone browser and in the branch for fragile populations at financial risk.
And finally, the recent spate of bank consolidations, hurried mergers and "fire sale" acquisitions have left American's deposits largely concentrated in the hands of three institutions: Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup. Regulators will be challenged to prove that federal bailouts were justifiable. Did they super-concentrate economic power in a few institutions or compromise the competitive market for setting retail and commercial lending rates and underwriting criteria? GoodBank would offer regulators a new paradigm: a semantic Web savvy bank using social benefit transparency accounting. Thus, GoodBank will show regulators ways to insist that an increasingly less competitive industry account for its social impacts.
How many people does your innovation serve or plan to serve? Exactly who will benefit from your innovation?
Conscious consumers want smaller carbon and globalization footprints. Ethical branch and online financial services can help.
Our bank branches will be hubs for social financial literacy, to make customers smarter in gauging the social impacts of spending and saving. Our branches will be more than ATMs and tellers. We will use fewer branches, reducing our carbon footprint. Branches will be sustainably designed, and stay open later and on weekends. Our employees will make "house-calls" to serve physically-challenged customers.
Online, customers can use their money profitably for ethical purposes. Our online tools will include meaningful financial web services that map to socially-responsible cash-back rewards. Our credit card statements will show individual and affinity group spending patterns by region impacted and social cause served.
This Entry is about (Issues)
Sustainability
Financing source
How is your initiative financed (or how do you expect your initiative will be financed)?
As an ethical bank, we expect to attract institutional, venture and individual investors. Institutional investors we will pursue include (1) pension funds, other banks and financial institutions interested in learning about the conscious consumer's banking preferences and (2) the emerging private equity funds for cleantech and socially-responsible businesses. While GoodBank does not strive to generate venture capital returns, the bank incubates emerging affinity group financial solution technologies, a feature that may attract venture capital firms and partners who invest in social benefit, triple-bottom line activities. And we will seek investment from high net worth individuals and their family foundation endowments so as to leverage opinion leaders' personal passions to open socially-transparent financial markets and change the banking paradigm through affinity networks, complementary currency and bottom of the pyramid focused activities.
Initially, we aim to raise $5 million in seed capital, followed by another round to raise $35 million as core capital for GoodBank (once a provisional banking charter permits).
If known, provide information on your finances and organization:
As a de novo bank, we will grow to have branches in four cities/regions within two years. We will also have a significant online and mobile banking presence, with data from the web populating our core consumer social financial literacy tools, Means Meter® and sustainable resiliency®.
[GoodBank is being organized and is not yet in operation. Our annual budget, revenue and staffing estimates are available upon qualified investor request.]
What are the main financial barriers and how do you plan to address them?
Our main financial barriers are the start-up capital ($5 million) to recruit a core management team of experienced bankers, and to pilot our cutting-edge financial technologies.
To attract core capital, we plan to put our business plan up on the Web as a Wikipedia-like work in progress, wholly transparent, viral and openly organic from the get-go. Hits to the website will prove customer interest, and help prioritize the roll out of GoodBank’s services. The Wiki will attract venture philanthropists and investors in social finance tools to fund the bank’s early stage $5 million equity.
The core management team of “ethical bankers” are easier to find now than a year ago. Fall out from traditional bank failures and consolidations put seasoned professionals up for hire, and may pull them to the career path GoodBank offers.
Piloting our core transparency tool will be achieved by investing in existing technologies and alliances. Sustainable resiliency® ratings will leverage and align quality of life measures. The Means Meter® will fuse product bar coded CSR data and "wisdom of crowds" consumer ratings suggested through the Wiki.
Aside from financial sustainability, how do you plan to grow the initiative?
GoodBank is empowering a mainstream movement of social responsibility for lender and borrower. We expect to attract young celebrity spokespeople and opinion influencers for teenagers and college students. GoodBank will provide capital to the social sector, engendering media coverage of human interest or eco-friendly news stories featuring our innovative deal structure and affinity group buying/banking power.
The Story
Please select one
What was the motivation or defining moment that led to the creation of this innovation? Tell us the story.
Frustration with the current banking services to social sector and the mass psychology of low expectations regarding banks motivated me to form GoodBank.
Frank Capra’s "It’s a Wonderful Life" (1946) and his much earlier "American Madness" (1932) present powerful images that motivate me. While watching Capra's films, I've wondered what happened to the close ties between local stories and bank capital, how they got lost in Wall Street's over- engineering of securitized unaccountability. I began researching how to restore local impacts as building credit quality.
[N.B.: My reference to "American Madness" can be best understood by reviewing this link http://www.moviediva.com/MD_root/reviewpages/MDAmericanMadness.htm]
I instinctively believed that the mass market buying power of conscious consumers could do more than bought-and-paid-for-government to restore transparency of impacts into the banking system. Socially responsible depositors could make banking safer and less toxic to how people earn a living, own a home, keep a job and preserve intergenerational wealth and opportunities.
A bank that underwrites social benefit will build its depositor loyalty. A holistically impactful bank could be an engine for sustainably financing social benefit businesses and NGOs, at rates far cheaper than investment equity's return on investment and without the liquidity risk to social entrepreneurs of flight and evanescence that private equity and periodic grants entails.
Please provide a personal bio of the social innovator behind this initiative.
Bruce Cahan is an Ashoka Fellow, social entrepreneur, non-residential fellow of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, real estate and finance lawyer, merchant banker, government geospatial technologist, 9/11 emergency responder and father of twin 15-year olds.
Bruce’s social finance expertise is uniquely prescient. In 1989, a steam pipe exploded outside his apartment building, spraying the neighborhood with 220 pounds of asbestos wrapping in an 18-story geyser of steam for several hours. After that, Bruce foresaw New York City’s need for geospatial preparedness, founded Urban Logic as a nonprofit, to make America’s cities safer and sustainable, and convinced New York City to fund and build a multi-agency GIS base map using $20+ million he identified in the City’s capital budget to pay for it.
Bruce practiced finance and real estate law in New York with the international law firm of Weil, Gotshal & Manges, for clients ranging from General Electric and Citi, to New York’s Development Corporation, to the Salvation Army. Bruce graduated from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Temple Law School.
a) Please identify the individuals that your innovation benefits (Please check all that apply)
Producers , Consumers , Holders of assets.
b) Do you help the people you serve to buy goods or services using financial innovation? If so, how?
Yes.
We treat the socially responsible shopper holding a credit card as coining conscious credit: to buy goods and services that improve the Earth.
Every consumer carries their social values to market and shop. Yet, a consumer's social values play almost no role in setting personal interest rates, earning cash-back rewards or using bank services to improve environmental and social justice.
GoodBank helps customers aim their social values out at the world. Whether shopping for milk, electronics, cars, homes or other consumables and capital goods, our customers' dollar votes get tallied and rewarded, transparently.
Each customer controls their social relationship with GoodBank by choosing the conscious goal(s) they want to improve. One customer may aim to reduce child malnutrition in the world, another may want to reduce their carbon footprint, a third may want to reduce homelessness locally, a fourth may want to improve local economies and organic agriculture. Using social impacts data from third parties, the consumer's buying habits - previously known only to retailers, credit card companies and their "affiliates" - become visible and a source of social and affinity group buying power.
Monthly, the bank's account statements show standard information (opening/closing balances, interest paid, etc.), plus a new section on how selected social goals were achieved (or put at risk) by the customer's buying habits. Simultaneously, the bank totals conscious consumers' purchases by social goals of highest dollar concern, and posts that aggregate data as an RSS feed so as to broadcast the social concerns and favored retailers of our customers to a wider audience. Using actual bank customer buying statistics and demographics (grouped so as to protect individual privacy), social benefit businesses and nonprofits catering to given social goals (i.e., organic food, diversity hiring) will have a free quantitative measure of the retail sales value of their competitive advantages and complementary synergies.
GoodBank's cash-back rewards are different. Instead of hoarding points to buy a gadget or vacation, our customers can invest their rewards in social benefit businesses that change the world.
c) Do you help the people you serve to sell goods or services using financial innovation? If so, how?
Yes.
As with buyers of goods and services, GoodBank empowers social benefit businesses to get better credit terms, grow social affinity networks of buyers and participate in co-branded programs to improve environmental and social conditions throughout the world.
GoodBank would also provide new revenue development options for such businesses, together with the appropriate expansion financing.
Say a small social benefit business (for-profit or nonprofit) in Oakland or Philadelphia trains young people and workers in transition to build furniture out of recycled products. Assume that the U.S. Government through the General Services Administration (or a Fortune 500 company through their corporate buying office) traditionally buys millions of dollars of furniture, trucking it across the planet to the office building where it will live out its useful life. GoodBank will use procurement visualization software to find and use such institutional buying as a new option for its social benefit business clients to grow revenues from previously inaccessible market segments.
GoodBank's cash-back rewards may be invested in affiliated mutual funds that invest in (or make loans or grants to) such businesses, expanding the liquidity options for business owners beyond traditional venture capital, foundation grant and standard bank loans. In essence, the complementary currency represented by the cash-back reward transmutes conscious credit back into conscious coinage/money, held as a share in a social benefit business or pooled fund of such businesses.
GoodBank helps social benefit businesses generate larger, more reliable and affordable pools of capital, as socially-responsive debt (SRD) to match the growing pools of equity known as SRI (socially responsible investment).
As GoodBank's customer, social benefit businesses agree to make social benefit reporting part of their competitive advantage and corporate financial practices. Such an open source social accounting process germinates more SRI content across the Web, and informs next generation product, service and corporate socially responsibility ratings.
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 | Iwanjka said: Hello, We join the intention of a GoodBank, which Bruce is starting. As a related topic we just started doing research to another ... about this Competition Entry. - 1072 days ago read more > |
| David Reiling said: Bruce Cahan, As an owner and operator of three CDFI Banks I read your submission with great interest. Starting a denovo bank and ... about this Competition Entry. - 1193 days ago read more > |
| Bruce Cahan said: This is a way to see and use patterns of procurement by government and corporations to aim at social goals, instead of campaign ... about this Competition Entry. - 1229 days ago read more > |
| Bruce Cahan said: Both have lots more detail. Simplistically, sustainable resiliency® is a regional backboard (think basketball) composited as an ... about this Competition Entry. - 1229 days ago read more > |
| Bruce Cahan said: As a regional score, sustainable resiliency® impactfulness will be the main metric GoodBank will use to answer “Did we raise or lower ... about this Competition Entry. - 1229 days ago read more > |
| Bruce Cahan said: Our lending decisions will tie the purposefulness of the credit to its impact on a regional scorecard (sustainable resiliency®). Much ... about this Competition Entry. - 1229 days ago read more > |
| Bruce Cahan said: Our lending decisions will tie the purposefulness of the credit to its impact on a regional scorecard (sustainable resiliency®). Much ... about this Competition Entry. - 1229 days ago read more > |
| Bruce Cahan said: Thanks for reading about GoodBank. I am often asked questions and probed for more details about GoodBank as an ethical bank. To ... about this Competition Entry. - 1229 days ago read more > |
Comments
Thanks for reading about GoodBank.
I am often asked questions and probed for more details about GoodBank as an ethical bank.
To supplement the Changemakers' entry, I will post some of the questions and answers, and encourage readers to submit others for discussion and learning together.
Many Thanks,
Bruce
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Bruce B. Cahan
bcahan (at) urbanlogic.org
As a regional score, sustainable resiliency® impactfulness will be the main metric GoodBank will use to answer “Did we raise or lower sustainable resiliency® for the regions our bank’s transactions touched?” Likewise, the Means Meter®-ed conscious consumerism will show trends in our customers’ gaining awareness and focusing their concern on improving their personal (reported in the aggregate) focus on healthy living and planetary outcomes. Like other CSR (corporate social responsibility) reports, we will aim to report in GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) and standardized comparable formats.
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Bruce B. Cahan
bcahan (at) urbanlogic.org
Our lending decisions will tie the purposefulness of the credit to its impact on a regional scorecard (sustainable resiliency®).
Much like a FICO score, our calculaton of sustainable resiliency® will be published for regions where our customers have and want to have an impact. Also, our customers’ aggregate conscious consumerism profile priorities (as transacted through their Means Meter® credit card use) will be published, so as to attract corporate and government attention to the eco, health, fair trade, social or other concerns our customers consider relevant to product selection and brand loyalty.
There are other “open source” kinds of information services that GoodBank will gestate, whether that information is free or licensed, is a detail to be discussed.
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Bruce B. Cahan
bcahan (at) urbanlogic.org
Our lending decisions will tie the purposefulness of the credit to its impact on a regional scorecard (sustainable resiliency®).
Much like a FICO score, our calculaton of sustainable resiliency® will be published for regions where our customers have and want to have an impact. Also, our customers’ aggregate conscious consumerism profile priorities (as transacted through their Means Meter® credit card use) will be published, so as to attract corporate and government attention to the eco, health, fair trade, social or other concerns our customers consider relevant to product selection and brand loyalty.
There are other “open source” kinds of information services that GoodBank will gestate, whether that information is free or licensed, is a detail to be discussed.
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Bruce B. Cahan
bcahan (at) urbanlogic.org
Both have lots more detail.
Simplistically, sustainable resiliency® is a regional backboard (think basketball) composited as an open taxonomy (think Wikipedia®) of concerns about the sustainability and resiliency of regional activities, society and environment. In other words, GoodBank doesn’t create a rating of a region’s quality of life. Instead all the world’s experts and expertise about the region are invited to metatag their knowledge and let sustainable resiliency® fuse it spatially and temporally (by place and time) so as to create a portfolio score. While the sustainable resiliency® algorithm may be proprietary, the calculated results will be publicly available.
The Means Meter® is a platform for discovering and guiding the impacts of conscious consumerism on sustainable resiliency® in a place/region you care most about.
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Bruce B. Cahan
bcahan (at) urbanlogic.org
This is a way to see and use patterns of procurement by government and corporations to aim at social goals, instead of campaign financiers’ goals. Government procurement data can be mined for such patterns, whereby GoodBank as a merchant bank can extend working capital and expansion financing to worthwhile social enterprises whose goods and services would not otherwise have been solicited by the procurement, yet who are fully capable of fulfilling the bid. Focusing on procurement let’s GoodBank add revenue potential to social enterprises, while safely expanding our social business lending activity – knowing that the government or corporate buyer will create credit-worthy receivables.
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Bruce B. Cahan
bcahan (at) urbanlogic.org
Bruce Cahan,
As an owner and operator of three CDFI Banks I read your submission with great interest. Starting a denovo bank and lending money in a highly regulated industry is ticky. Few examples: To start a bank in most states will take about $10 million minimum in capital even though the state may indicate lower levels. Seeking a "community development" bank charter has some significant drawbacks particularly to the environmental and organic food focus you desire. These areas are currently not a part of a community development bank charter or CRA regulation. Growing your denovo bank to profitability is critical not only for financial sustainability but regulatory survival.
The CDFI certification and funding can be a very helpful source of supplemental capital and access to deposits. However, it does come with significant reporting requirements. I would encourage you to contact the Community Development Bankers Association as a resource for practical information regarding the CDFI Fund.
Best Wishes - David
Hello,
We join the intention of a GoodBank, which Bruce is starting. As a related topic we just started doing research to another type of currency. A currency in which not only 'material stuff' has value, but in which non-material aspects such as environment, society, doing good, etc. is included as well.
The GoodBank Bruce is starting includes these 'requirements' too. Another initiative which has related elements in it is called 'transition towns'.
At the link below we keep an overview of similar initiatives, maybe crosslinking gives new ideas or impulses! (The link to the ethical GoodBank is included as well). And maybe the various initiatives can start exchanging value, once realised.
http://www.spirilogic.com/01-GoodIdeas/02-Alternative%20Money/02-%20Othe...
We would be thankful when readers notify us when they know of other people, other related ideas, etc.
Keep on doing the good work,
Iwanjka,
SpiriLogic member
www.spirilogic.com