Much like roots do for a tree, valuable local economic activity (including community barter organizations) is taking place across the country that sustains and supports families and communities. These diverse forms of livelihood are viable and powerful, and these basic forms of cooperation and solidarity nourish us on a daily basis with friendship and love.

It’s this larger community that keeps us alive in times of crises when a job is ended, a house burns down or a paycheck just is not enough. Relationships make us human and meet our most basic need for love, care and mutual support. We all have our own forms of wealth, and with imagination we can take them to a higher level.


Many economies are familiar to us:

Household Economies—meeting our needs with our own skills and work: raising children, offering advice or comfort, teaching life skills, cooking, cleaning, building, balancing the checkbook, fixing the car, growing food and medicine, raising animals. Much of this work has been rendered invisible or devalued as “women’s work.”

Gift Economies—built on shared circles of generosity: volunteer fire companies, food banks, giving rides to hitch-hikers, donating to community organizations, sharing food.

Barter Economies—trading services with friends or neighbors, swapping one useful thing for another: returning a favor, exchanging plants or seeds, and time-based local currencies as well as commercial trade exchanges.

Gathering Economies—living on the abundance of Earth’s gift economy: hunting, fishing, and foraging. Also re-directing the waste stream—salvaging from demolition sites, gleaning from already-harvested farm fields, dumpster-diving.

Cooperative Economies—based on common ownership and/or control of resources: worker-owned and -run businesses, collective housing, intentional communities, health care cooperatives, community land trusts.

Community Market Economies—networks of exchange built from small businesses and cooperatives that are accountable to their communities through social ties, innovative ownership models, and mutual support. Such economies are not created to make large profits, but to provide healthy, modest livelihoods to their participants, and services to the larger community.

For more information on how community barter builds local self-reliance and fosters self-determination see: COMMUNITY

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 20th, 2008 at 7:33 am and is filed under From The Street. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.