CommunityCurrenciesLaw.org

Legal information, best practices, and supporting tools for time banks, local currencies, and barter exchanges.

Welcome to Community Currencies Law: Creating Monetary Resilience

by · Published · Updated

A community without dollars is not a community without wealth. Every community, no matter how money poor, has a wealth of abilities and the capacity to create material resources.  Dollars give us an organized means of sharing and exchanging those abilities and resources.  However, when there is a scarcity of dollars, our economy need not grind to a frightening halt.  We need only find additional ways to share and exchange.

The vast realm of economic possibility created by community currencies also churns up new legal grey areas. CommunityCurrenciesLaw is a user-supported library of legal tools, research, and resources to support economies based on emerging forms of community exchange.

CommunityCurrenciesLaw is a project of the Sustainable Economies Law Center. We believe that legal information should be public, free, accessible, and easy to understand. That’s why we created our series of eResource libraries which support the creation and growth of cooperatives, urban agriculture, community enterprise, community currencies, and community food.

IMPORTANT!: CommunityCurrenciesLaw was created by the Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC) to provide a forum for sharing, organizing, and making sense of information related to the laws relevant to building resilient communities. The information on this website is not legal advice, and should absolutely not be taken as true or accurate, especially because this is a collaborative space in which many people are contributing ideas and information. Information on this page could become outdated, and laws vary from place to place.

Most importantly, we’d like to repeat that the information contained here is NOT LEGAL ADVICE. Anyone who uses this website should verify this information independently and seek independent legal counsel before relying on any of this information. If you have read this entire paragraph, congratulations and thank you! Now you are warmed up and ready to dive into our resources!

This site is also a work-in-progress, so please check back often as it evolves and contact us if you’d like to contribute. Thanks for joining us!

Chris Tittle

A recent transplant to Oakland, Chris is passionate about exploring life-sustaining alternatives to the neo-liberal market paradigm. In his role as Director of Organizational Resilience, he is working to build SELC’s internal resilience, diversify SELC's sources of support, and bring principles of social and economic justice into SELC’s funding strategy. Among his many other roles, he contributes to SELC’s Community Currencies, Resilient Communities Legal Cafe, and Rethinking Home programs, working to cultivate more democratic and place-based models for building community resilience. Chris recently completed an MA in Economics for Transition at Schumacher College, an international whole-person learning center near Totnes, UK. While in the UK, he was active in Occupy London’s Energy, Equity and Environment working group, and helped guide a community exploration of Totnes’ monetary ecology with Transition Town Totnes. His dissertation explored permaculture and a Rights of Nature framework as more culturally-appropriate and generative responses to climate change adaptation in the Global South. Chris has previously worked as an ecological educator, outdoor guide, and environmental journalist, earning his BA in Non-Western History and Poverty Studies from Washington and Lee University. His writing can be found on Shareable.net, MNN.com, and his blog at oaktreegarden.wordpress.com

You may also like...

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: