NEF:Evaluating your community currency: free handbook
22 Apr 2014 11:47 AM
From local currencies to time
banks, more and more people and organisations are setting up new forms of
exchange in a bid to tackle thesocial, economic and environmental problems they see in their
communities.
But are they working? Things are
still a little hazy in the community currency (CC) world when it comes to
impact. Just like any other kind of grassroots innovation, the demanding day to
day running of CC projects makes it easy for impact evaluation to slip right
off organisers’ list of priorities.
This may sound trivial, but the
resulting overall lack of properly evaluated CC projects is bad news on several
counts: it makes it tricky for organisers to learn from other projects, for
instance, or win more funding, credibility and media attention for what they
are doing.
That’s why today NEF is
releasing ‘No Small Change’ – a how-to guide for
community currency organisers looking to effectively evaluate the impact of
their project. The guide highlights the value of pausing to ask
what your currency project is aiming to achieve, and how this can be measured
– and offers practical advice on going about it.
Click
here to download No Small Change.
After all, the results of an
effective project evaluation can speak volumes. Take the community time-credit
systems up and running in South Wales, where one hour of time given to a
community cause earns one credit that can be used to access cultural, leisure
or educational activities. Their early impact evaluation has found that over
two thirds of those taking part in the time bank claim it has improved their
quality of life. 45% of people involved feel less isolated, 64% feel more able
to influence what their community is like and 63% feel more positive about
their future. You can hear stories from some of those taking part here.
We’ll be releasing more
data and case studies from currency pilots based in France, Belgium, Holland
and the UK over the year, as part of an ongoing North West European
collaboration, ‘Community
Currencies in Action’.
Political and media interest in
the field is mounting, partly spurred on by high profile digital currencies
like Bitcoin. This makes it all
the more important that socially valuable currencies are able to shout about
the impact they are having, and avoid being drowned out by news of new markets
and profit opportunities in the booming payments services and e-money
industries.
We’re talking about impact
not just in straight economic terms, but impact more broadly – such as
how the everyday running of a small business might improve with the use of a
new digital payment system provided by a local currency, or how an elderly
resident might feel more connected to their neighbours because of a time
banking scheme. Part of the success of community currencies is how they are
embedded in people’s day to day lives, so it’s crucial to develop
ways to capture these changes that can easily go undetected.
Devising your theory of
change
This is why we’ve proposed
a technique called ‘Theory of Change’ for evaluating the mixture of
community currencies out there. It’s an evaluation method that involves
getting together with a wide range of project stakeholders and working out
exactly what building blocks must be put in place in order to reach your long
term goals.
A long term goal, for example,
might be more jobs for a local area – whereas a key short term building
block for achieving this could be freeing up the balance sheets of small
businesses through enabling them to exchange supplies with other local
traders.
The guide and online
toolkit we’ve put together serve as a starting point for
projects of all scales and budgets to work out how best to capture their
impact. We emphasise the importance involving the full range of people impacted
by the currency, asking questions like What changes can the project
make? How can these effects be measured? and most importantly,Why
do these matter?
We hope it will be of great
value to anybody working to help socially valuable currencies take off in their
communities, and would love to hear what you think
ISSUES
Community
Currencies