Mid Maine TimeBank

Natural-burial and home-funeral advocate Chuck Lakin, a woodworker from Waterville who is a member of the timebank, recently set up a make-your-own-coffin workshop because members of the public had shown a lot of interest, according to the owner of Barrels in Waterville, where the workshop was to have been held.  Click on the link below to learn more about what Chuck does, and maybe learn a bit about yourself as well.  

Waterville 'make-your-own-coffin' class dead on arrival

A MESSAGE FROM TIMEBANKING FOUNDER EDGAR CAHN:

HOW PRESIDENT OBAMA CAN BEAT THE ODDS AND MAKE GOOD ON HIS COMMITMENTS

Edgar S. Cahn, CEO TimeBanks USA, Distinguished Professor of Law, UDC David A. Clarke School of Law

  In his Inaugural Address, President Obama make some commitments that seem to defy fiscal reality:

"A little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anyone else."

"We reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future."

"We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit."

The problem: there are not enough funds, public, private philanthropic to pay the cost, at market prices, for all the educational services and all the health care services needed to make good on those promises.

For a quarter century, the TimeBanking community has been demonstrating how to make the impossible possible. There is vast untapped capacity in community. We have proven that:

Healthy seniors and their families can provide reliable, informal care that reduces medical costs.

Fifth graders can tutor third graders who otherwise fail to attain essential reading levels.

Teenagers can tutor elementary school children using evidence-based cross-age peer tutoring.

How could this get paid for? How can we record, recognize and reward labor from a work force that is not recognized or valued by the GDP? For decades, the TimeBank community in the United States and thirty four other countries has been learning how to do it, teaching us all that every one of us has something special to give.

The function of a medium of exchange is to put supply and demand, capacity and need together. What money does not value, TimeBanking does. TimeBanking provides a tax-exempt, local medium of exchange that uses Time as a currency. One hour helping another (regardless of mainstream market value) equal one Time Credit. TimeBanking has proven capable of harnessing vast untapped capacity that the market does not value to address vast unmet needs.

Ask the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation which just made a major award to Neighborhood Health Centers of Lehigh Valley to utilize its TimeBank program as a resource to help build a super utilizer intervention program to reduce health care costs. For ten years, home visits by Lehigh Valley TimeBank members functioning as health coaches and providing informal support have helped folks with chronic problems stay healthy and at home.

Ask Mayor Bloomberg’s Department for the Aging which has established TimeBank programs for seniors in all five boroughs to provide the kind of informal support needed to promote health and prevent unnecessary utilization of the emergency room care by elders.

Ask the Visiting Nurse Service of New York (with a 3,000 member TimeBank) that reports that 79% of TimeBank members felt that their membership gives them support they need to be able to stay in their homes and community as they get older and 100% reported they have benefited from becoming a TimeBank member.

Ask the National Education Association or do a Google search to see if Cross-Age Peer Tutoring rates the status of an evidence-based instructional and remedial strategy.

Ask the Washington State Office of Public Instruction for its authoritative manual on Cross-Age Peer Tutoring.

Ask the National Science Foundation why it granted nearly $1million dollars to Pennsylvania State University Center for Human-Computer Interaction to develop mobile apps for TimeBanking so every Smartphone user can be a time banker.

It’s time America discovered its vast hidden wealth: people not in the work force – seniors, teenagers, children, the disabled – whose energy and capacity has been tapped by TimeBanking for over a quarter century to strengthen fragile families, rebuild community, enhance health, promote trust, restore hope.

President Obama, if you want to do the impossible, it’s time to bet on each other and on our collective capacity. TimeBanking supplies a medium of exchange that translates “Created Equal” into a currency that embodies that equality. If we take it to scale, we can make good on delivering those “inalienable rights” to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness promised to every one of us by the Founding Fathers.

TimeBanks USA

5500 39th St. NW

Washington, D.C. 20015

While many of MMTB’s members are actively earning and spending time dollars, occasionally we focus on some folks who have been particularly active.

Sharon is a new member who offers piano lessons to beginners through about third year; she is also a barber and offers haircuts to men, women and young people. She offers her services as a bookkeeper or secretary or administrative assistant as well. And as if that were not enough, she has been giving folks rides for appointments and errands, trimming bushes, and providing education on the issue of invasive forest pests. Sharon has been busy!!!

Greg is very handy and can handle most household repairs, or jobs needing a little muscle. Though he is not a licensed plumber or electrician, he says he has learned a lot over the years. Greg has been busy moving heavy items for folks, splitting wood, doing a variety of small plumbing jobs, caulking a driveway, doing touchup painting, and providing invaluable help in building community for the organization.

Glen, another new member, is handy at most things around the home or school. He can do light plumbing, light electrical, yard cleaning and a variety of other projects around the home such as interior painting. Examples of his recent activity include delivering firewood and helping a couple figure out the electrical “chaos” in their basement.

Some of MMTB’s members attended the recent Hour Exchange Portland (HEP) holiday fair at St. Luke’s Parish Hall in Portland, Maine. They were able to attend the event and spend their time dollars because HEP is a member of MMTB, and vice versa.

Judy, one of our members who attended, was really pleased with the items she was able to purchase with her time dollars. She came away with two very nice pieces of pottery, a wonderful carved wood camel, some beautiful note cards, and a couple of charming fairy wands (for her grandchildren). In addition to a variety of items for sale by HEP members, there were raffle drawings throughout the day (raffle tickets were free). There was also some excellent food for sale (for cold, hard cash – as a fundraiser for the organization).

All in all, it was an excellent event!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

What really scares you? Our TimeBank Director, Stacey Jacobsohn, will be joining other guests for a roundtable on  "Envision This" radio show to examine the scariness of scarcity, or how we came to live in Scare City, and how we might move out. Join us at 8pm Halloween, and call in to talk about what really scares you!

Burl and Merry, MMTB members, are proud and grateful  to announce that this show has been upgraded to "featured host" status by the Blog Talk Radio editorial team.  It is exciting to know that more listeners will get to hear the voices of some pretty inspiring visionaries, and the extraordinary effort that Merry and Burl have made in building community.

ROUNDTABLE: HELPING PEOPLE MOVE OUT OF SCARE CITY

ENVISION THIS...A public that actually sees, acknowledges, and addresses the FEAR and DENIAL obscuring the urgent need to envision a more sustainable, resilient, and equitable future.  In round-table with several former guests, we will discuss how to actualize this vision. We want to help people move from the scarcity of today's culture into an abundant future.  We will explore together: Why is there such rampant DENIAL that we are being brought down by a corporation/government regime? How do we defuse fear and grief (or mobilize them) sufficiently to move past DENIAL? How do we get enough people to see that WE actually have the power once we accept that “The only thing we have to fear is FEAR itself.” How can we help folks to experience the abundance that our Earth offers us? How do we convince people that true COURAGE is not fearlessness or certainty of the outcome, but willingness to act in the face of fear and doubt? Participants will include: Jim Gerritsen, CR Lawn, Gary Brumback, Stacey Jacobsohn, and Merry and Burl Hall.

LISTEN ONLINE HERE!

Call in to speak with the host: (646) 652-2235

A recent National Public Radio segment focused on the ways in which time banks are helping folks in Spain survive in very tough economic times.  You can read or listen to it at http://www.npr.org/2012/09/22/161380937/time-banks-help-spaniards-weather-financial-crisis?sc=emaf .  We highly recommend it!

Hour Exchange Portland will have a free screening of the PBS documentary Fixing the Future at 5:30pm on Thursday, Sept. 27th at 303 Payson Smith Hall on USM's Portland Campus (off Falmouth St.) Special thanks to USM's Sociology Department and Student Sociology Association for hosting this event.

Fixing the Future features Hour Exchange Portland along with other local solutions to fixing the economy, including local banking, buy-local campaigns, local currency, worker owned cooperatives, and more. We recommend arriving early – when the doors open at 5pm – to assure you will get a seat and so that you can hear the various introductions to the film.

Those who can’t attend the event may sign up to receive more information at www.becomeamerica.com .

Stacey Jacobsohn, primary coordinator of the Mid-Maine TimeBank, was the guest speaker on Envision This! on Wednesday August 1st. Stacey provided a very good introduction to time banking during her first visit to the radio program, and over 10,500 visitors downloaded the first archived show! WOW! She returned again on August 1st to dive deeper into the concepts of time banking; this show has also proven to be very popular.

 In case you missed them, these and other programs are archived for your listening pleasure at www.blogtalkradio.com/envision-this -- scroll down to “on demand” episodes, or go to these links:

Show 1: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/envision-this/2012/07/13/time-banking-a-more-equitable-currency

Show 2: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/envision-this/2012/08/03/revised-version-of-time-banking-supports-equitable-community

For future programs on “blogtalkradio,” which are every Wednesday night at 8 pm, you can listen to the live broadcast two ways. On your computer, go to the link above. There you can listen to the show as well as send in comments and questions by email. If you would prefer, you can listen to live broadcasts by telephone by calling (646) 652-2235 just before 8 pm. You can call in questions and comments during the program by following the directions given at that phone number. Isn’t this new technology amazing! You can also listen only by calling on Skype!

 A final thought:    ENVISION THIS...a community held together by exchanging hours of service instead of $$! Timebanking provides an alternative economic system that pays people, no matter who they are or what they are doing, in accordance to the time they invest in a job. In timebanking the currency of exchange is time, accounted for by the hour, instead of money or direct barter. This is a very egalitarian system, valuing everybody’s hour the same, breaking down the class, age, and gender inequities in our current monetary system.

Mid Maine TimeBank Coordinator Stacey Jacobsohn speaks to Merry and Burl Hall on the benefits of Time Banking, on "Envision This," a new radio show dedicated to local sustainability and community-building innovations and ideas:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/envision-this/2012/07/13/time-banking-a-more-equitable-currency

ENVISION THIS!, Merry and Burl's new online radio show (see story in previous blog posting, below) , is going live this Wednesday, July 11 at 8 pm and will be doing a second live show on Friday, July 13 at 1 pm.  ENVISION THIS! connects listeners with innovators who are helping to create a sustainable, resilient, and equitable future for humanity and the earth.

This Wednesday's episode is: Bike-hikers Pedaling All Summer to Promote Earth-friendly Communities

The Maine contingent of college-aged cyclists from New England Climate Summer are pedaling from town to town in New England to lean about how small communities are becoming more sustainable and earth-friendly. They will be camping out in a church in Merry and Burl’s neck of the woods this week, so they will be interviewing the bikers Wednesday evening. These young adult visionaries are on a mission to learn about and publicize what people are doing to make their communities more self-sustaining and earth-friendly. They believe so strongly in developing sustainable and resilient lifestyles and communities that they are willing to forego the comforts of home, convenience of motorized transportation, income from summer jobs, and their own free time to pedal long distances, sleep on church pews, and live on a pittance. They want to share their concerns regarding peak oil, climate change, and increasing corporate control of our lives and money, as well as the good news about the wonderful, local things that are being done to promote a brighter future.

Burl and Merry look forward to talking with them.  Please listen at www.BlogTalkRadio/envision-this  at 8 pm Wednesday, July 11. You are invited to submit your questions and comments by dialing in during the show to (646) 652-2235 and then dialing 1 to queue up for comments or questions. We also invite anyone with suggestions for topics, guests, or ways to improve ENVISION THIS! to email Merry and Burl at  envisionthisradio@yahoo.com .   If you can't tune in at 8 pm, Burl and Merry will be archiving their shows on their website so you can listen when it is convenient for you. 

The second live show will be on Friday July 13th at 1 pm, and the topic is: Time Banking Introduces Hours as a Unit of Exchange Instead of Money

Envision this …an alternative economic system that pays people, no matter who they are or what they are doing, in accordance to the time they invest in a job. To help you envision this, Burl and Merry will be interviewing Stacey Jacobsohn, the head of the Mid Maine TimeBank. The currency of exchange is time, accounted for by the hour, instead of money or direct barter. This is a very egalitarian system, valuing everybody’s hour the same, breaking down the class, age, and gender inequities in our current monetary system. Perhaps you would like to develop a system like this in your area? Stacey would be a good one to talk to. Or perhaps you just want to know how it is working and what some of the challenges are. Again, she would be one to ask.

Because this will be a live show, you can call in to (646) 378-1145 to contribute questions or comments. Since 1 pm Friday is not the normal broadcast time, Burl and Merry will do a rerun during their usual ENVISION THIS! time, Wednesday, July 16 at 8 pm. If you have questions or opinions you want expressed, but can’t tune in Friday at 1 pm, email them to envisionthisradio@yahoo.com .

Also, Burl and Merry have just set up a new discussion group at  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/envisionthisradio/  where they will announce upcoming shows and host interactive discussion of recent shows among listeners. Through such interactive communication with you, they can make their dream of a truly interactive and community-driven show come true. You are not just a listener. Burl and Merry are a network, not a pyramid.   They look forward to hearing from you on-air.