By Jonathan Porritt

Time is precious. And so it is. But it really bugs me that most people who trot out this old axiom are using 'precious' to mean financially valuable.

As if every waking hour of every day had a money value attached to it, with the hidden message that we should be using those hours simply to make more money.

But time is precious for all sorts of different reasons, in terms of relationships, relaxation, exploration, recreation and so on.

Of all the new organizations I have seen popping up over the past few years, none has a better sense of the true value of time than Fair Shares.

Based in Gloucester (with schemes in Newent and Stonehouse and plans for several more), Fair Shares brings people together using time as local currency.

People who join the scheme volunteer their time and skills, which earn them 'fair shares' from others in the scheme, a record of these credits is kept in the scheme's Time Bank and people then use their credits to 'buy' help from others as and when they need it.

It's all based on a successful US programme called Time Dollars, which has been highly influential in helping to rebuild communities in American cities for nearly a decade.

It provides an extremely simple way of allowing people to support each other without formal, bureaucratic organisations getting in the way, and acts as a powerful reinforcer of mutual solidarity and community cohesion.

By rewarding things that have no formal money value in the market value in the market economy (caring, child-rearing, volunteering, doing favours, fixing, helping out, etc.) such a scheme "rewards human kindness and decency as automatically as the conventional money system rewards competitiveness and greed."

It sometimes seems as if society's 'sharing impulse' has been driven underground in this high pressure, materialistic world of ours. Huddled round our TV’s or computers, we seem to spend less time together anyway, and attach less value to that indefinable quality of life derived from being part of a mutually supportive community. So Fair Shares sounds to me like the cavalry arriving in the nick of time.
Jonathon Porritt is Director of Forum for the Future, which campaigns for solutions to today's environmental problems. He lives in Cheltenham.

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Jonathan Porritt

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