Many Hands Make Light Work

Recently, my next door neighbor told me about her friend who has a one-year old grandchild who is undergoing treatment for cancer. Their community of friends and family decided to raise funds to support the family by organizing teams to do yard work in exchange for donations. I signed up with a $100 donation and yesterday, a team of five women showed up at 2pm and worked for one hour, raking, cleaning up garden beds, and heaving tarps full of leaves into the compost bin and woods. I was stunned to see how much was accomplished in just one hour. It saved me hours of work. Over two weekends, they had multiple teams going to many homes and estimated they will raise over $4,200 for the family.

“Win-win” has become a cliché, yet we all kept saying it, recognizing how much they were helping me, while my monetary donation was helping the family they all cared about…and we all were having fun doing physical labor and seeing the positive results of the work so quickly. In a time when unemployment is high and social connections in communities are often weak, this experience makes me wonder about how we can create local economies and exchanges to help each other.

One example is Time Bank, which enables local communities to set up exchanges of time and labor. I recently attended a meeting in Essex, MA where the host paid Cape Ann TimeBank hours to someone who cooked the lunch. She had earned the Time Bank hours she spent that day by working in gardens in the spring, something she genuinely enjoys. The goal of the system is "to build a community among a wide range of residents of Cape Ann and to empower them to contribute to each other’s well-being through giving and receiving services. A timebank is an alternate economy that is based on time rather than dollars. Every member’s time is valued equally and exchanged on an hour-for-hour basis."

Clay Shirky, in his book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, states that Wikipedia was built with just 1% of the person-hours that people spend watching television each year. He points out that we have a large surplus of cognitive capacity that is being wasted in people passively watching television. With the latest internet and social media technologies, we can put these skills, intellect and creativity to work collaboratively in new ways that can advance the common good.