new economics institute
Local currencies are designed to encourage trade at locally owned businesses. At the same time their very design can reflect and honor the history and culture or an area. This is true of BerkShares. On the 20 BerkShare note, for example, you find Herman Melville, novelist, essayist, poet, and mariner. Melville is best known as the author of one of the greatest of all American novels, “Moby Dick” (1851).
Background Information
"Catalyze the Great Transition," builds on work carried out by the Tellus Institute in Boston over the past 15 years and, more recently, by the New Economics Foundation in London to delineate a rigorous and hopeful vision and pathway to an equitable and sustainable future.
"Lowly, unpurposeful, and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city's wealth of public life may grow." --Jane Jacobs from "The Death and Life of Great American Cities."
Judith Schwartz turns to Jane Jacobs for ideas that matter when it comes to economics. See her Miller-McCune article below.
http://www.miller-mccune.com/business_economics/what-jane-jacobs-can-tea...
What Jane Jacobs Can Teach Us About the Economy
Late urban champion's notions about decline and imports newly resonant during this recession.
By: Judith D. Schwartz | October 24, 2009
David Boyle is one of the senior staff at the New Economics Foundation in London and well known for his writings on local currencies. He is part of the NEF team working with the E. F. Schumacher Society to form the New Economics Institute in North America.
David gave the following address last week at the launch of the Brixton Pound.
Today's "Washington Post" credits BerkShares local currency with inspiring launch of the Brixton Pound as a citizen-driven economic development tool in London's poorest neighborhood.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/26/AR200909...
When Going Gets Tough, Local Currency Gets Going
By Karla Adam
Special to the Washington Post
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Concept2 Rowing and the Craftsbury Green Nordic Racing Program are organizing a worldwide rowing/skiing challenge that will cover 350 million meters all before October 24. Volunteers in Panama City’s Parque Nacional Soberania gathered to plant 350 native species trees and almost doubled their target. Community members are gathering in Vancouver for a 350-person salsa dancing extravaganza.
Father Thomas Berry first spoke for the Schumacher Society in 1984, then again in 1991, and finally in 2004.
An inspired student of Teilhard de Chardin, he was deeply in love with the planet itself, as a living being. Its visible signs of deterioration grieved him. Concerned, he thought at first to use his gift of speech to describe the scope of Earth's devastation, believing that such a picture would lead his listeners to acts of restoration.