Regenerative Currencies

Quick tips for making currencies that protect people and the planet

Pre-frame & Currency Justice Acknowledgement:

As a white & trans co-conspirator within the liberatory work of regenerative economics, it’s important to me to acknowledge that this has always been a multifaceted movement led by those whose lives and ways have been oppressed within colonial economies, especially BIPOC communities and feminine caregivers, whose mutual aid networks and pre-colonial knowledge have carried entire communities and cultures through ongoing and incalculable exploitation, all while their unpaid and underpaid labor has been extracted for the profit of those in power.

Regenerative economics and the ideas it contains are not “new”. In fact, they are some of the oldest and most time-tested strategies that both people and nature have successfully modeled across all of time. We may be freshly applying these ancient strategies to function in a new technological and social context, but they are already exemplified successfully in countless ways across all intact ecosystems and pre-colonial societies, not to mention within our own living bodies and healthy current-day households even inside the most exploitative economies.

As a member of the trans & queer community, I know I am part of a courageous and intercultural lineage of all who break the mold. I hope to apply this piece of my identity as a currency justice activist by illuminating and breaking the mold of how money has been built to oppress indigeneity, femininity, liberation, equity, racial justice, and ecosystem health; creatively exploring “why” things are the way they are; sharing liberatory learnings from my own transition as we are transitioning towards truly regenerative systems; and aligning my effort and voice with the leadership of all those who are already doing this work, whether or not they are currently recognized as experts, because they have been exemplifying regenerative economic principles beyond all memory — sometimes without even knowing it.

“we are each other’s safety

right now, and every day”

— from “it is our turn to carry the world” by adrienne maree brown

It’s such an important time to protect communities and cultivate the health of the planet. In our homes, in our communities, and across our economies.

In the United States as well as many other places across our beautiful, chaotic planet, we’re seeing oligarchs consolidating power and attacking our communities, especially communities of color, while dismantling large-scale safety nets and individual livelihoods. Massive cutbacks of public funding are leaving communities and local governments in the position to need to pick up the slack where larger support systems are disappearing.

And we can see that those seeking to grab power have done so by leveraging people’s lived experiences of scarcity. Where I live, economic fears and the pressures of rising costs have been at their highest point ever recorded. That has led to many well-intentioned people placing their votes behind someone who says he can fix this issue, but there are no solutions in sight, aside from claims that lowering taxes on the wealthy and flooding markets with more fossil fuels will help. In fact, Nobel Prize winning economists expect this current wave of policies to significantly increase long-term inflation.

At its source, this public wave of economic distress (which power-hungry politicians are riding) is signaling something bigger, something shared across parties, and something that we can thankfully do something about. But because of the nature of how our economy works, solving this will take big changes not just to our government policies and individual choices, but also will require us to change how money works at a fundamental level.

Already before the massive funding cuts that are now taking place in the U.S., we have known that many of the largest roadblocks to positive change and public well-being have been financial. Community organizers and changemaking organizations have known the needs of their communities and dreamed of viable, multi-generational solutions continuously through the whole history of colonial economies, surviving both secretly and vibrantly through this ongoing oppression that is now again bearing its wealthy fangs.

But even with deep knowledge and wisdom and courage and labor and brilliant organization, especially from BIPOC communities, money itself has preserved systemic barriers against making lasting positive change.

So let’s change those barriers.

Over thousands of years, we’ve seen the strengths and weaknesses of countless different innovative approaches to society, including diverse approaches to what we now refer to under the umbrella of “economics”, and we can combine all that we’ve learned across these many models to support our communities now.

Already, modern interest is skyrocketing surrounding barter systems, gifting economies, Buen Vivir, time-banks, mutual aid, Gross National Happiness, community resource & tool libraries, community land trusts, monetary reform, mutual credit systems, and many other incredible economic strategies (most of which draw their strengths from indigenous wisdom and long-held ancestral practices).

All of these approaches offer strengths and tools our communities can leverage. All have presented lessons we can learn from. And while these movements are changing the world, there are still key roadblocks to their success and sustainability that keep cropping up and blocking the lasting security of our communities.

Some of the most insidious of these roadblocks have to do with the subtle properties of how money itself works, things we rarely discuss about how money is designed, what its shortcomings are, and how it preserves itself as a dominant system.

So this post is intended to provide key knowledge and starting points for diverse community leaders to make it successfully past three of these remaining roadblocks, while making it possible to use existing community currency software (not cryptocurrency — that’s something completely different) to pilot poverty-free, inflation-free systems of exchange that are fundamentally designed to prioritize human and ecological wellness.

This toolkit could certainly be employed by local, regional, and even national governments as a way to keep communities economically thriving and to fund essential activities despite federal policies in the USA reducing the resources available to local communities and our global neighbors. Indeed, this might be one of the most urgent cases for bringing these ideas into the mainstream.

With that said, I personally believe that it is essential — both ethically and economically — to have these changes be led by (and implemented within) the most economically marginalized communities first.

Different parts of the world have differing (or non-existent) laws surrounding community currencies, so you may need to work in partnership with your local government to launch one of these projects, but thankfully everything you need in terms of knowledge and technology is already available, and the case for governments to support these approaches is strengthening every day.

Here’s a down-and-dirty summary of why and how to make a regenerative currency (or whatever else your community might like to call a community currency that’s designed to support people and the planet). The end of each section in this post has more links and resources for if you’re ready to move forward and learn more.

Three big problems, three big solutions:

The following is a concise summary of three economic challenges we face that stem directly from the properties of modern money, each paired with a solution that’s enabled by using a community currency. Then in the following section we’ll talk through each of these three points in more depth:

• Real value regenerates, but money is permanent (because of this disconnect, modern money preserves an artificial caste system and a repeating cost of living)

  • As a solution, we can make currencies that constantly recycle themselves (naturally redistributing wealth, cancelling out repeating costs, and self-funding essential priorities)

• Supply & demand mandate chronic scarcity whenever there is a cost for basic well-being (making it impossible to fully eliminate poverty with community wealth-building, even in the most developed areas)

  • As a solution, we can make currency systems that adaptively fund other strategies for meeting basic needs and completing essential work without private costs (generating essential funding as needed and making well-being a fundamental right for free)

• Financial systems ignore most essential priorities (making it expensive to prioritize social & ecological survival while making exploitation profitable)

  • As a solution, we can correlate new currency systems directly with the real world through safe and dynamic data (making it profitable to benefit people and nature while making it expensive to incur social & ecological costs)

Let’s dive into each of these three concepts a little deeper:

Challenge 1: Recycling Value

We live in a world where nothing is truly permanent, yet we use currencies designed to act like stores of value (things which are relatively permanent). A classic example of a store of value is gold, which is one of the few things in the world that actually lasts for extraordinarily long periods of time without deteriorating.

But you can’t eat gold. All the real value we most need to survive is temporary, such as food that gets eaten and housing that needs to be maintained over time. Using a permanent currency for trading temporary value creates an artificial, repeating cost — for us this is the “cost of living”.

But what’s amazing is this cost is just a mathematical inconsistency between money and reality.

The first societies to ever use money partly solved this issue by using grains and other temporary but semi-preservable goods as their main forms of currency. More of it could literally be grown by the community, increasing economic abundance in the same act as growing the food that sustained people’s health, and making folks more wealthy the more they supported their society with this abundance.

And because it was edible and decayed over time, these grains matched the laws of physics in how they constantly recycled into and out of circulation, just like all of the most essential forms of real value. Instead of money consolidating in the hands of the wealthy as real value was repeatedly consumed, financial wealth could be grown by communities as they literally cultivated more abundance.

The introduction of the first metal coins by those in power replaced this system and manufactured an artificial repeating cost for meeting basic needs.

In order to buy essentials like food, this meant you now had to provide your labor to those holding a permanent form of financial wealth. You then have to pay that money away again for your survival, spending a permanent currency for impermanent need fulfillment. Then you have to do it all again. And again. And again. And at the same time, the holders of significant wealth can keep it indefinitely or invest it for profit.

This manufactured cost remains thousands of years later as the poverty line, the self-sufficiency-standard, the cost of living, or whatever you like to call the repeating cost of making ends meet.

Using a “store of value” (something permanent) as a “medium of exchange” (something used to trade other things, e.g. “money”) slyly institutes a system of indentured labor while establishing a mandatory monetary caste system. Our current forms of money still maintain this artificial caste system.

Permanent currencies permanently preserve the class dominance of a subset of people with wealth.

I’m not recommending we go back to trading with grains, but we can learn profound things from the math of how those systems worked. We can even tap into ancestral wisdom and combine it with modern digital tools to cancel out the cost of living completely, because it’s just an artificial mathematical error (even though this mathematical error has been abused by those in power for their own benefit).

Already some community currencies use a property called “demurrage” to charge a small percentage cost or “negative interest” on money held. That helps with solving many economic issues, and has been incredibly successful in small pilot implementations even helping some local economies thrive through the Great Depression.

But I recommend taking this a bit further and actively making a currency that leaves circulation a small percentage at a time, not just one that requires a percentage to be paid while staying in circulation.

Make a currency that slowly leaves circulation a small percentage at a time, just like grains decay a bit at a time, and you are left with a total circulating supply that balances itself out while directly measuring the real forms of value we need to have backing our financial economies — real value that itself is constantly decaying and regenerating.

It then becomes sustainable to introduce new money as payment for the introduction of new abundance without producing inflation from excess money building up, and this money can flow through our economies the same way real value does — by constantly circulating, slowly decaying, and being regenerated right where it’s most needed.

This can be used to acknowledge essential work as the true source of our communities’ wealth, not just in terms of growing and building and producing and providing everything essential to our survival, but also in terms of being the key way of generating and maintaining the community’s financial wealth. Then that wealth slowly leaves circulation both in terms of real value and financial value, leaving space to generate more money without it building up, while naturally distributing abundance everywhere it is needed.

And the work that’s funded by this mechanism of introducing new wealth can include everything essential: from growing food, to providing medical care, to maintaining healthy ecosystems. All the rest of commerce could still happen through trades and exchanges and purchases, but every part of a comfortable standard of living can be sustainably funded by directly introducing this kind of currency.

Wherever real value enters circulation in forms like food and healthcare and housing and clean water and increased biodiversity and education, you can pay the providers of this value abundantly (with no cost to the recipients) by literally introducing new money. That money then directly measures the value these essential workers introduce into the economy — anchoring the value of the currency to meeting the average daily needs of an individual.

The more needs they meet, the more they get paid, and the more wealthy the whole community becomes in terms of both financial value and real value.

Build real abundance, and you build financial abundance. It’s a direct correlation.

Some resources for further reading on this first concept:

• Creating Wealth — Growing Local Economies with Local Currencies A city-level guide to local currencies by Gwendolyn Hallsmith & Bernard Lietaer

• Wealth, Virtual Wealth, & Debt — The Solution of the Economic Paradox A 100-year-old recognition of monetary systems mismatching with the physics of energy flows by Nobel Prize Winner Frederick Soddy

Further writing from me on this subject:

• Make Money Better, Chapter 1 — Backing Lifespan-Based Assets How to make currencies backed by temporary forms of real value

• Make Money Better, Chapter 3 — The Cost of Entropy An essay elaborating on how poverty is mandated by permanent currencies and can be eliminated with regenerative currencies

• Make Money Better, Chapter 4 — Considerations for Currency Generation A more detailed discussion of how to implement a currency that is generated to fund essential activities

Challenge 2: Solving Chronic Scarcity

Introducing a direct correlation between real value and financial value can open the door to solving our next challenge: chronic patterns of economically-reinforced scarcity. Indigenous author and researcher Tyson Yunkaporta describes this issue well: “You cannot price anything in this economic system that we have now unless it’s limitable and excludable.”

The pattern he’s describing is mediated by the system of supply and demand. The strength of supply and demand is that it has the capacity to mediate prices at an equilibrium that systemically strikes a balance between those who want to buy something and those who want to sell it. It’s one of the most central concepts in modern economics, and it works great for luxury purchases.

The issue with supply and demand lies in the fact that any price equilibrium depends on scarcity, which simply doesn’t work for basic needs and essential purchases. When you replace preference-based “demand” with non-optional “need”, this famous equilibrium actually makes it permanently impossible to eliminate poverty for as long as there is any cost for any component of well-being.

This is ultimately because supply and demand require scarcity to be part of the balance of determining prices. Increasing how much food or housing is present in a community means lowering prices, and there’s only so much lower a price can get for a good or service before it is considered “overproduced” because it is no longer sustainable or even possible to provide. This always stops the introduction of essential goods and services at a maximum limit that is less than a population needs to be secure.

To keep a market functioning, supply must be less than demand, preserving a shortage that’s always at least scarce enough to keep prices higher than the cost of production. When you use supply and demand to mediate the prices for large, fancy televisions this is fine, but basic and essential goods and services are another story.

In this way, market equilibriums mandate that a percentage of the population must always be living (and dying) in chronic scarcity and poverty, regardless of how much money the poorest individuals make. Even with more jobs, lower taxes, more welfare, better technology, or even a basic income, prices will always rise anytime community wealth rises, until the equilibrium price is again high enough to preserve the scarcity it mathematically depends upon.

Competition between buyers is a mandatory part of supply and demand, and when people are competing against each other for basic survival, they’ll spend whatever they have to. Increasing their wealth or covering the costs of only a portion of their needs will mean that competition drives up all the remaining costs until there’s poverty again.

Pareto-Optimal Markets are those that have reached a stable equilibrium such that nobody can become better-off without somebody else becoming worse-off by an equal amount. In its impact on basic needs, this concept can be extended to recognize that even with development, infrastructure, technology, and economic growth being optimal, supply and demand will require that there still be a balance point where lifting any additional person above the poverty line means putting someone else beneath it.

Again, we’re not talking about preference or desirability when we’re looking at the demand for a baseline of essential goods and services, we’re looking at need. And we should not tolerate a system that permanently depends upon a percentage of the population being artificially excluded from survival.

We could conceivably solve this issues through any strategy where we provide all components of basic well-being without a cost, and perhaps non-monetary solutions will be something we choose to establish for this purpose someday.

But before we can even consider getting there from here, we need to have a safe and effective transition strategy that allows us to release our existing dependence on scarcity-dependent markets as the sole way we coordinate the movement of survival-level value. At least at first, we will need to have a way to still use money for funding basic needs, but without price equilibriums mandating scarcity.

In our current systems, grow more beans, and it becomes less profitable to grow beans. Grow fewer, and each one becomes more valuable. There’s an inverse correlation between how much real abundance is in circulation and how much financial value you can get out of providing more.

But if you think back to the last section, we just found an exciting way to establish a direct correlation between abundance and income for producers — a way to make abundance the most profitable strategy — by generating a slowly-recycling currency into the hands of those producing real value. We’ve got a way to adaptively pay the farmers and care providers and essential workers who make all of our lives possible.

We’ve got the key.

Solving this problem with a currency hasn’t been technologically possible at a large scale at any point in history before now, even though meeting basic needs for free has been possible at small scales and mirrors the function of many natural processes.

But today, all our mainstream currencies are already moving towards being on apps and cards and electronic devices, technologies which could make this transition not just feasible, but actually simpler and more intuitive than how money currently works.

We can establish a system that gives fair and consistent payments to the providers of all components of a social and ecological baseline of well-being, with people still choosing what they want to “buy” for free based on their preferences.

We can do this by generating new wealth to measure and fund the production of new abundance by those recipient-chosen providers. Then supply and demand can continue to be used for all the optional purchases across the economy in a way that makes this money valuable and motivating to generate.

Instead of a pricing strategy where increased demand means increased prices for essential goods and services, and therefore an increased cost of living every time communities start making more money, this system would make it rewarding for there to be increased production anytime there’s increased need, funded with stable rates of currency generation. There’s no more mandatory competition between buyers to drive up the cost of living.

It’s a non-market strategy that still lets us use a familiar-feeling currency. And it can do so while facilitating more buyer freedom than “free” markets, because you wouldn’t need to be wealthy in order to exert market demand, you’d just need to choose how you want your needs met. Then you can still buy and sell luxury goods and services as much as you like using supply and demand, because everyone’s basic needs are already met.

Instead of there being an indefinitely rising cost for basic well-being, we can self-fund security for our communities with newly introduced funding, then correlate how long that money stays in circulation with how long real essential value stays in circulation. The percentage rate of how the currency leaves circulation can then be designed to match the value of essential work measured as a percentage of all value across the whole economy. This cancels out the cost of survival completely. We can make well-being free as a basic right without having to stop using money.

The barrier that currently keeps us from simply generating new money like this is inflation. If you introduced more and more of our existing, permanent forms of money, that money could lose value itself. The value of money itself goes down if it’s more common.

We actually already see this happening to a certain extent all the time with newly introduced bank money (although most cases of recent inflation have actually been caused by sellers raising prices to take record profits even when their costs haven’t gone up). In any case, our current currency monetary system mandates constant inflation, and it’s stressing most of the world out: on average, everything is constantly getting more expensive, and something’s got to give.

But with a currency that slowly leaves circulation, you can actually keep this from happening, anchoring the average value of a currency relative to how much actual value is circulating in the world.

Permanent currencies must by definition have impermanent value, but impermanent currencies can have a permanent standard of measurement that links their value to a real metric over time, such as the value of sustaining an average person’s life for a day.

And that idea is exciting even if you’re currently secure across all your basic needs: we’re not just talking about an approach for solving poverty, but also for completely ending the issue of systemic inflation.

Resources for further reading on this second concept:

The Engineers and the Price System — On the Nature and Uses of Sabotage by Thorstein Veblen: “…the only means of keeping up prices is a conscientious withdrawal of efficiency in these staple industries on which the community depends for a supply of the necessaries of life.” (p.12)

Absolute Vs. Relative Income and Health by Brady Et al: A study showing that wealth doesn’t predict your health and well-being; what matters is whether you’re making more or less than the people around you. This is a verification of the dynamic of basic needs being inaccessible for a percentage of the population even in communities with a lot of money.

Further writings from me about this:

Make Money Better, Chapter 2 — Standard Units for Regenerative Currencies How to link the units of a currency to a human-centered standard of value that’s stable over time

Make Money Better, Chapter 3 — Inverse Markets Taking our markets from an inverse correlation between real & financial value towards a direct correlation

Challenge 3: Addressing Economic Externalities

One of the most central challenges in our current economies is that of protecting and prioritizing essential forms of value that are non-financial, like health, biodiversity, and mental well-being. Our current economies financially benefit people the most when they don’t care about these essential forms of real wealth, and focus purely on building monetary wealth “at any cost”.

But the properties of a currency with a dynamic supply and a changeable rate of currency recirculation make it possible for the best financial strategies to also be the ones that most benefit people and the planet.

We can actually design our wallets to have empathy — to “feel” loss when our world experiences loss, and to “feel” abundance when our world becomes more abundant. We as humans have developed this capacity as one of the most important emotional skills for living as self-interested individuals who can thrive lovingly in larger communities, so it’s the perfect opportunity for us to apply some economic biomimicry of empathy itself.

In our current systems, most real forms of essential value are “external” to our economies in the sense that they are not calculated in any financial bottom lines, but they impact all of our well-being and basic survival and actually have massive economic impacts for our societies overall.

Even though most “successful” private individuals and corporations don’t currently calculate the costs of social and ecological exploitation as their responsibility, these costs are still massive and very concretely real. Mostly, these costs then fall on the bodies and wallets of those experiencing racial and economic oppression, while also degrading the shared health of our global ecosystem.

To make sure these costs are no longer “externalized” onto people and nature from the standpoint of monetary calculations, we can define our priorities, measure them by collecting safe, transparent, and anonymous data, and correlate real conditions directly with economic conditions.

Since new kinds of currency can slowly leave circulation over time, it’s exciting to note that the percentage rate of how fast a currency leaves circulation could dynamically and automatically change so the total supply of money and the longevity of that money each correlate with the abundance and longevity of real value in circulation.

And since the standard units of this sort of currency can be stable relative to meeting basic needs, this variable total amount in circulation will scale directly relative to the number of people being supported and the degree to which they have access to meeting their basic needs. It’s a person-centered, modular system that can scale to support any number of people, and the longevity and average amount of wealth per person will then correlate directly with real conditions.

This would mean that everybody can become wealthier and keep their wealth for longer when real world conditions improve, and each individual and business takes a financial hit when our shared well-being takes a hit. We have the opportunity to build a whole new data-informed financial system of accountability.

This makes it possible to economically prioritize not just the kinds of value we can trade, but also those that make healthy trade possible in the first place — everything that sustains our communities and ecosystems from biodiversity to racial equity to mental health to protected acres of wild-space.

This lets us have a currency that is responsive to how much real value there is across our communities and ecosystems, and where everybody participating has greater wealth and longer wealth-longevity when people and the planet are more secure.

And we can value safe, ethical, responsive, and just data showing even the most brutal conditions as backing more wealth than either a lack of knowledge or unethical data claiming to show good conditions, incentivizing everyone to benefit financially from paying accountable attention to real situations, then moving towards progress.

Such a currency would literally be backed by data showing levels of social & ecological well-being, and the more ethically collected information becomes available, and the more it shows us moving towards positive conditions, the more financial abundance the community will have.

We can make money with empathy.

Resources on this concept:

The Value of Everything — Making and Taking in the Global Economy by Mariana Mazzucato explores the history and impacts of how our economies interpret what is “valuable” and what is not

What is Data Justice? — The Case for Connecting Digital Rights and Freedoms Globally by Linnet Taylor highlights the importance of emphasizing justice and ethics in our uses of data

Markets and the Future of the Circular Economy by Thomas Siderius and Trevor Zink highlights how markets prevent progress towards waste-free, regenerative, and economically circular systems, and instead will preserve “rebranded business as usual” until we start using different economic approaches

Further writings by me:

Make Money Better, Chapter 2 — Data Backing in Regenerative Currency Systems Connecting a Regenerative Currency System with real world conditions

Make Money Better, Chapter 4 — Equilibrium Balances The nature of how account balances would work in a data-responsive currency system

Make Money Better, Chapter 4 — Transaction Fees Transaction fees can be an optional tool for balancing spending and saving pressures alongside wealth longevity changes, stabilizing currency strength and velocity despite changes in currency supply

Make Money Better, Chapter 4 — Data Backing Considerations Deeper explorations of how to correlate real conditions with the longevity and supply of a digital currency

Implementation

This post just scratches the surface of these three key changes we can implement in the currencies we use, and there are lots more exciting conversations and considerations to explore! There are many safeguards and technical specifics to discuss as well, but we first need this conversation to be easy to have at a dinner table, to feel safe and easy to everybody, and for it to make sense comfortably.

The important thing to note is that whatever solutions we choose, and however we talk about them, if we continue to use existing currencies in the ways we are now, it will constantly prevent us from making progress towards social and ecological security.

Charity, tax-funded welfare, volunteering, basic incomes, universal employment, higher wages — all of these are important and needed band-aids for people’s survival within a dysfunctional system, but their positive impacts will continue to be counteracted systemically and automatically for as long as we use currencies whose properties preserve caste systems and prevent community-wide security.

The math makes it so that even if we had all the technology and infrastructure and well-meaning politicians in the world, poverty and ecological exploitation would still be maintained by the way our money and markets currently work until we address these key issues. Again, these are:

• Real value constantly regenerates — we need money that does the same.

  • If we don’t make this change, survival will always mean trying to work off an artificial & recurring debt the holders of wealth.

• Supply and demand preserve scarcity in essential markets — we need basic well-being to be free, and any monetary system we use needs to sustainably self-fund solutions that act separately from supply and demand. (Supply and demand can work fine for pricing optional purchases, but cannot be used for essential ones because they mandate scarcity).

  • If we don’t make this change, a percentage of the global population will always be kept in chronic poverty regardless of interventions towards better development, equality, and community wealth.

• Most essential forms of real value have nothing to do with money or profit — we need monetary systems designed for empathy, systems that value what we value, and where the most profitable strategy is also the one most aligned with cultivating the common good.

  • If we don’t make this change, exploitation will always remain more competitively advantageous than security and abundance in the financial world, meaning individuals, businesses, and even whole countries stand to be “out-competed” by others that are maximizing exploitation for the sake of financial domination.

These are solvable problems, and I believe the very economic motivations that are elevating candidates across the world into abuses of power right now show we are actually ripe as a global population to say that our economies are not working.

People are angry and scared for valid reasons, and there is no reason to attack each other for “taking” jobs while in the same breath cutting those jobs, or for feeling like we need to cut support systems and make people pay more for their basic well-being because we’re stressed about how much life costs.

We need to realize that we’re all stressed by the same things, even though we point blame in different directions, and the scarcity mindset that’s behind all of it is responding to an artificial form of scarcity that’s very real but also very optionally baked into the fundamental properties of our monetary system.

We can change that system.

We have all the technology and resources and workers and motivation and willpower to provide abundantly for our whole global community — we just are struggling to do so inside of an economic environment that makes exploitation profitable and optimizes towards artificial scarcity. That system is simply a human-made tool, and these few changes can make money itself into a tool for shared well-being and security.

If you want to launch this sort of regenerative currency for your community, state, or country, or even adjust the properties of a community currency pilot or form of legal tender you might already be implementing, the lucky thing is the tools all exist!

For the software to launch this kind of system at the community level, there are some great options offered for free or very low cost by The Social Trade Organization and Community Forge. Lots of different community currencies use these and other platforms safely and effectively worldwide!

For more information and specifics about the particular approach I’ve been describing, you can reference the free public living document Make Money Better and learn more at Make-Money-Better.com. This is the continued evolution of my initial 2022 publication outlining these ideas, and it contains extensive reflections that can guide implementation discussions, especially throughout the fourth chapter. Please feel invited to contribute online to improving this living document and always feel welcome to download and share it for free!

There are lots of successful community currencies around the world with a variety of properties, as well as many brilliant minds behind making them work. For a great resource on how other forms of currencies might be implemented, check out Gwendolyn Hallsmith’s free e-books.

A great model for thinking about the changes we need in our economies is Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics model. I’ve published a summary of how her framework can inform the design of Regenerative Currencies in this Doughnut Economics Action Lab Tool.

And please reach out to me with any ways I can support you! I’m excited to offer my time and collaborate, especially with boosting equitably community-led projects. My email for community currency work is Alex@Make-Money-Better.com.

Let’s make economic systems that love our communities as much as we do,

—

Alex