Prefigurative Community Building (Part 17)
Timebanks and Skillshares: Reclaiming Reciprocity Through Collective Exchange
In a world shaped by extraction, debt, and competition, many communities are seeking alternatives to transactional economies. The rapid rise in cost of living, particularly in housing, healthcare, and education, has pushed millions into precarity, while leaving abundant human skills, care, and time untapped. A different economic logic is possible, one built not on profit or hierarchy, but on reciprocity and trust.
Timebanks and Skillshares offer one such path. By allowing people to exchange labor and knowledge without money, they reawaken our capacity to give, receive, and coordinate directly with one another. These systems are not charities, and they are not barter. They are ecosystems of mutual aid, sustained by the principle that everyone's time, and everyone's contribution, has value.
Coordination Pattern: Timebanks / Skillshares
A Timebank is a network where members trade services using time as a currency: one hour of your time earns one hour of someone else’s. A Skillshare is a platform or event-based system where people teach and learn from each other without formal credentials, cost, or hierarchy.
Both models decentralize value. They resist economic marginalization by recognizing and validating labor that capitalism often ignores: child care, emotional support, mending clothes, teaching language, sharing food, fixing bikes. They build Power With by coordinating around shared needs and gifts rather than imposed scarcity or control.
This model is especially vital now: it uplifts not only those locked out of employment but also those excluded from systems of formal education, healthcare, or access to basic tools. It is a flexible, resilient approach to reweaving communities.
Step-by-Step Guide to Starting a Timebank or Skillshare
1. Build a Founding Circle
Start small: 3 to 10 people who trust each other and are motivated to seed a culture of reciprocity. Prioritize diversity of age, background, and skills.
“How to Start a TimeBank” guide by TimeBanks USA
The Mutual Aid Toolkit – for horizontal group formation
2. Define Shared Principles
Agree on values like equality of time, inclusivity, non-monetary exchange, and reciprocal trust. Emphasize participation without gatekeeping or hierarchy.
Sociocracy for All – for inclusive governance design
3. Choose a Platform (or Stay Analog)
You can host exchanges online or in person. For online, choose software that respects privacy and ease of access. Or begin with a whiteboard or a shared notebook.
Community Weaver – open-source Timebanking software
hOurworld – another grassroots timebanking network
4. Map Local Needs and Offerings
Host a gathering or send out a survey asking:
What skills can you share?
What support do you need?
Use this data to create a directory of offerings and requests.
5. Launch a Pilot Round
Start with a small batch of exchanges. Document experiences. Gather feedback. Celebrate publicly to attract others.
Use social media or posters at local libraries, laundromats, food co-ops
Encourage storytelling as a form of community visibility
6. Facilitate Ongoing Coordination
Use group meetings, shared calendars, or skillshare potlucks to deepen connection. Rotate facilitators. Let new members shape the evolution.
Art of Hosting resources – for non-hierarchical facilitation
Liberating Structures – practical tools for inclusive collaboration
7. Sustain the Pattern without Centralization
Avoid becoming an NGO or service provider. Let the system stay light, peer-driven, and flexible. Instead of formal membership, use affinity, trust, and visibility to maintain integrity.
Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux – insights on decentralized structures
Avoiding Power Over
Timebanks and skillshares can become hierarchical if designed poorly. To resist Power Over:
No experts in charge: Acknowledge all skills as valuable, not just the professional or academic ones.
No gatekeepers: Allow people to self-define their contributions. Avoid vetting or credentialing.
No extraction: Don’t convert timebank credits into money, or allow businesses to “outsource” labor through the system.
No coercion: Participation should be entirely voluntary, with no quotas or expectations.
No centralized leadership: Use rotating roles, consent-based decisions, and shared facilitation to prevent consolidation of power.
Two Existing Projects
1. Onion River Exchange (Vermont, USA)
A community timebank operating for over 15 years in Montpelier, where people trade everything from eldercare to editing to snow shoveling. They maintain a digital directory but emphasize in-person relationships.
🔗 https://www.orexchange.org
2. Barcelona Time Bank Network (Spain)
A city-supported mesh of dozens of neighborhood timebanks. Each one is autonomous but linked, allowing people to exchange services citywide without money. They also organize shared learning events and mutual aid campaigns.
🔗 https://bancdeltemps.org/
(in Catalan/Spanish)
Closing Reflection: Reciprocity as Resistance
Timebanks and skillshares are not utopian fixes. But they are living seeds of a different logic, one where survival, joy, and dignity are not mediated by wealth or employment, but through the simple recognition that everyone has something to offer, and everyone deserves support.
In these networks, Power With is not an abstraction. It emerges from the ordinary acts of caring for one another without superiority or transaction. It grows stronger with each exchange, each laugh, each shared meal, each moment of being seen and valued not for what we produce, but for who we are in community.