Germantown: Printing Money to Help the Community

In tough economic times, creativity is sometimes needed to get value out of every dollar. One way of doing this, as employees of the Germantown-based non-profit Resources for Human Development (RHD) will attest, is to start making your own.

Enter the Equal Dollars community currency, a money created, printed and regulated by RHD as a way to help grow the local economy and provide necessities at low costs for the consumers in it.

“It’s money we created, and our job is to give it value” says Deneene Brockington, director of the Equal Dollars community currency, “and our goal is to make it serve some basic goods and services: food, shelter, and at this stage in the game, health care.”

Brockington has been overseeing the 12-year-old currency for the past two years and notes an increase in its popularity in that time. She points to the recession as a main reason for its success, as members can use it to buy many of the basic needs she listed, including food, clothing and even medicine.

Monday is Brockington’s busiest day, when she oversees the Equal Dollars Food Market, one of the currency’s biggest successes. The market is held in an oversized storage room tucked into the side of 4700 Wissahickon Ave., a warehouse of a building where RHD is headquartered. When I arrive at 10:30 a.m., two volunteers, Ted and Jessica, are helping Brockington to sweep out the room, which contains little but some simple, wooden shelves and a few refrigerators.

Brockington explains they’re awaiting the late arrival of a U-Haul truck full of surplus food, donated by U.S. FoodServices every Monday. What the truck will bring is often a mystery.

“The fun part is we never know what we’re going to get, sometimes we get things that we would never regularly eat, like bok choy,” says Brockington, as she hands me some free flyers with recipe suggestions and nutritional information for some of the stranger food items sold at the market. “People are now getting opened up to these other foods that you normally wouldn’t buy.”

When the truck does arrive at an adjacent garage a few minutes later, the question of its lateness is answered when the back gate swings open and a mountain of food is revealed.

“You’re going to want to see this,” Brockington calls in from the garage. The shipment is larger than usual and the frantic pace to prepare the market for a 1 p.m. opening begins. A team of volunteers, over a dozen at this point, unloads everything from bananas to leeks, to overgrown mushrooms and deluxe-sized cans of tomato sauce and chili. An assembly line forms as men do the heavy lifting of moving the items from the truck to tables inside the room, where the women don latex gloves as they sort the items onto shelves and into bags. A sign-in sheet is passed around, as those who help to set the market up are paid 12 Equal Dollars an hour and get first pick of the produce.

The shop is prepared just as the 1 p.m. opening rolls around and customers start coming in. Some are members of the local community who use Equal Dollars, but the main staple of the currency are RHD employees, who are sometimes paid bonuses in Equal Dollars and can also use it to buy drugs from the SQA pharmacy, another component of the non-profit.

“I come down to the market every Monday and purchase groceries, and I go to our pharmacy, SQA, and get medicine there with Equal Dollars. It saves a lot of money,” says Chloe Johnson, an employee of RHD.

The items at the market are usually sold for a hybrid price, such as a pineapple selling for one U.S. dollar and one Equal Dollar. This helps to offset the actual delivery cost of the food, and adds real value to the Equal Dollar, of which RHD acts as the central regulator.

Brockington notes that the market can save customers a great deal on food. “When you go to the super market, and let’s say you’re getting a bag of baby leaf spinach, that can cost up to $3 for a small bag,” Brockington says. “Here, for a two pound bag of baby leaf spinach, we’re charging one Equal Dollar and one U.S. dollar so it’s a $2 savings.”

In addition to the market, the Equal Dollar currency can also be used to buy goods and services at local businesses, with the registration listing just over 30 members. Area vendors gather at RHD headquarters every other Tuesday, where they pay for space in Equal Dollars and sell their goods for hybrid prices.

If the whole idea of creating a local currency sounds a little far-fetched, it is helpful to remember that it is basically the same concept as the U.S. dollar, but on a smaller scale.

“Equal Dollars is a way for us to exchange goods and services between people in communities and not depend solely on the U.S. dollar value” says Bob Fishman, executive director of RHD and creator of the Equal Dollars currency.  “Printing money is easy, and it’s legal if it doesn’t look like the U.S. dollar. Getting people to accept it and exchange is the challenge.”

Essentially, any form of paper currency is only seen as valuable because those who use it agree that it has worth. If one were to gather a group of friends together and agree to print money that could be exchanged for services such as lawn mowing or goods such as vegetables, that money would then gain value. The Equal Dollars system does the same, but on a local economy scale, and it is hardly the first to do so.

One of the most successful implementations of local currencies occurred in the Austrian town of Worgl in the midst of the 1930s depression. The town’s government had accumulated an insurmountable amount of debt in the Austrian shilling and public services and construction froze. The government’s tax revenue was little more than a trickle, as the unemployment rate floated around 30 percent.

In an effort to save the town, Mayor Michael Unterguggenberger created labor certificates, which became known as Worgl schillings, backed by what was left of the town’s money, roughly 32,000 Austrian shillings. A negative interest was placed on the currency, meaning the quicker the certificates were spent, the more value they would have. This had the effect of jump-starting the economy, as Worgl residents repaid their taxes and even paid in advance. All local merchants and government agencies agreed to accept the new currency, and within a short period of time public works resumed. The Worgl shilling proved to be such a success that it spread to nearby towns, catching the attention of the Austrian Central Bank, who subsequently shut the currencies down.

Modern America has seen its fair share of successes in local currencies as well. One of the more notable cases is the BerkShare, a currency first issued in the Berkshires region of western Massachusetts in 2006. In its first three years, the BerkShare grew rapidly, with over 300 businesses accepting the currency for either partial or full payment, and well over two million notes placed into circulation. The currency benefits greatly from the cultural and geographic cohesiveness of the region.

The Equal Dollars system hopes to emulate some of this same success in the Philadelphia region, but it still has a lot of ground to cover. One unique aspect is a checking system developed and operated by RHD, which allows members to write checks issued by the non-profit. Another good sign is the confiscation of the first counterfeit Equal Dollars note, evidence that the currency is gaining value in the community.

“There are about 500 members [exchanging] around 12,000 units of Equal Dollars a year at this point,” says Fishman. And while RHD and its employees make up about half of the vendors and currency holders of the Equal Dollar system, Fishman says that significant progress is being made in getting community members to understand the value. “People are starting to realize they can directly exchange skills and services with each other, such as teaching a member photography and getting paid in Equal Dollars.”

Whatever the level of success the Equal Dollars community currency will encounter, the concept has been proven feasible and is already benefiting those who use it. “Since July of 2009, members have used 12,000 Equal Dollars” says Brockington. “So that’s 12,000 U.S. dollars they didn’t have to use for food, medications, or other essentials.”