How Does This Work?
Every person who joins gets a ledger account, which is initially set at zero.
The cool thing about timebanks is that you’re not restricted to one-to-one bartering so you don’t have to have an exact match of what each other wants at a given time in the exact quantity for an equal exchange. Instead you give what you can to the Timebank and then you are able to receive what you need from someone else in the community at any given time in the future.
The number of hours for any given service are determined and agreed upon by the individuals in each transaction.
When Anne receives a service from Bob for X number of hours, Ann’s account is debited by X amount, and Bob’s account is credited for the same amount. Bob uses his hour credits to request another service from Cynthia, a third party, and the cycle continues. Over time, with good faith and trust established, members’ accounts will tend to average around zero. When you join, although you may not have any credits (measured in hours) in your account, you can still request services and have negative hours. Members have a constant flux of credits and debits in their account. The entire system is always balanced by total debits against total credits amongst all the members.
CONTINUE: to read the Member Guidelines
http://timebank.sfbace.org/steps
