Well, it is and it isn't. HANDS (How About a Non Dollar System) is more than a convenient acronym; trading in our local currency feels more tangible, more human, than using dollars. With every HANDS transaction, I am building my community.
I notice the difference when I look at my balance statements online. When I log onto my conventional bank account, there's a slight yet palpable cringe, as my slow rural broadband ticks along and I wait for the account balances page to load.
As I scan the screen, I feel the cultural anxiety that for many of us creeps in around money. Where's it all going? When is my paycheque coming? How expensive were the groceries?
When we participate in the money system, whether we appear to be winning or losing, we buy into a giant global game in which some power broker rigging the rules in New York City can have a devastating effect on returns to farms here in my own community, without any of us fully understanding what's going on.
When I log onto our HANDS website, in contrast, my richness is not about the number hovering at the bottom line of my account. Instead my sense of abundance comes from being connected to so many valuable people.
In the debit column, I've used HANDS to pay for sauna sessions, visit local healers, buy seedlings from fellow gardeners, get help moving house and hire a neighbour to repair my fences.
I've paid for it all by selling things I don't need (such as the aforementioned laptop), using my writing skills and subletting my home.
The HANDS member directory, indexed by both offerings and neighbourhoods, tells me which of my neighbours has a trailer to help me move furniture, or who might be growing a surplus of organic persimmons.
Members offer everything from farm equipment repair to computer help; childcare to "dreadlock maintenance" - skills that often fall off the radar screen of our traditional economic system.
For some people here in Golden Bay, where high-dollar jobs aren't easy to come by, HANDS are easier to earn, so HANDS are more willingly spent.
Or maybe "spent" is the wrong word - for when I put some beautifully decorated HANDS notes into someone else's palm, those HANDS don't disappear; that other person merely gains the potential to exchange the energy elsewhere within our community.
That's all that money is, after all: a way of exchanging energy. I like knowing that mine is cycling right here around me.
With thanks to: Happyzine.co.nz
People worldwide are inventing their own small-scale monetary systems, as a tool for building community and promoting local economic self-reliance.
HANDS, operating in self-sufficiency-minded Golden Bay, is one of New Zealand's most successful alternative currencies.
Founded in 1989 by a small local committee, HANDS has become a community institution, with its own seasonal market events and a regular newsletter full of want ads and offerings. The system now has over 450 trading members.
How it works:
All members join up with a personal account balance at zero HANDS. (One HAND has roughly the purchasing power of one dollar.)
Members then go into debt or credit as they trade with one another.
Unlike a traditional bank account, the emphasis is on continual exchange rather than accumulation.
Members are allowed to go up to 1000 HANDS into surplus or debt, without penalty or interest.
Trading happens via the exchange of colourful voucher notes, and through an online system similar to internet banking.
A newly published book tells the full HANDS story.
Get a Handle on HANDS is available in hard copy from ?goldenbayhands@ihug.co.nz or le.org.nz, or as an ebook from e-junkie.com/117056/product/473614.php.
