01.22.09
Local Currencies: Energizing The Buy-Local Movement
Going green: Communities make their own currencies – SGVTribune.com
GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. – Diana Felber brought her groceries to the checkout and counted out her cash – purple, blue and green bills that are good only at businesses in western Massachusetts.
Known as “BerkShares,” the colorful currency is printed by a nonprofit group to encourage people to spend close to home in the state’s Berkshire region. Customers who use the money also get a built-in 10 percent discount, since they can get 100 BerkShares for just $90 at local banks.
“I like all the ideas about local,” said Felber, a 64-year-old artist shopping at the Berkshire Co-op Market. “I also like that it’s a discount. Who wouldn’t like that?”
The BerkShares program is one of the most successful of its kind in the country, and it is attracting attention as other communities look for ways to insulate their economies from the deepening financial crisis.
I ran across this in my old hometown paper, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune. I wrote about it in today’s Owner-Managed Business. I am cautiously optimistic about this new tactic in the quest to strengthen locally-owned businesses and build local economies. I am wondering just how effective the local currency would be without the discount pricing. Are potential customers being swayed by the pricing (the main reason they choose that national retailer we nicknamed “Big Blue”), or are they persuaded that buying local means more money stays in the local area, where it is available for things like hiring your brother-in-law who has been unemployed for five years?
Future Standards has a little to say about this as well.
Local Currencies Gaining Ground « Future Standards
“In the last four years, there has been a renewed interest in local economy, local production,” said Witt, executive director of the E. F. Schumacher Society, a Massachusetts-based think tank focused on local production. “It just skyrocketed with the collapse of the global economy.”
With our emerging focus on building locally-owned businesses, this is the kind of thing that energizes me. It makes me want to wake up the local chambers of commerce and try to resurrect our local “Valley Buck$” campaign from fifteen or sixteen years ago. To be sure, there is a lot of work involved, but this should get you energized and looking for a way to get your local community working together on their own buy-local programs, with or without the local currency element.
The Crooked Bow Tie sheds some more light: “Widely used in the United States in the early 1900s, local currencies are a legal, but underutilized tool for citizens to support local economies.” Go there and read the whole thing.
