The Appleseed permaculture model talks about financial, intellectual, living, material, cultural, experiential, social, and spiritual [capital]. I make sure that I keep those in my head because it's a part of my presentation pitch. Money is one-eighth of that, it’s only one part of what all our communities have to offer. I often talk about timebanking as seven-eights of that.
The people that show up inside of a timebank are giving ideas, they are giving their intellect away in exchange for a time trade. They are giving living capital, sometimes you just need a caring companion to sit with you. They are giving material capital, maybe they have a space like the North Park Nature Center where you can come and do a workshop and they timebank the space. There's cultural capital, maybe you know a language and you can share it with someone. Experiential capital, I know nothing about building garages but the guys that built this one put four walls up in 8 hours, there’s that experience of carpentry that I would like to know more in depth. Socially its relational, the relationships we have and who we know. Then there’s spiritual maybe you know about meditation or you have some other ideas around mysticism that you want to share. All of these things can be represented in timebanking in a much more robust way than you can do with money.
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