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It's one of those peculiar inefficiencies of modern life, which is rarely commented upon. We have highly stressed highly professional public services, increasingly embattled and overwhelmed by rising public demand. But we also have increasingly passive client groups, increasingly cut off from the networks around them, for whom time lies heavily. It's not that they are discouraged from taking an active part in life, but somehow their dependence on professionals seems to have this effect. Community activists so often seem to be divided neatly into the same two categories: semi-professional 'mentors' who volunteer, and of course ask for nothing back - and those people, designated as 'problems' by the professionals, who are volunteered to. Nobody asks this second group for anything. Fair enough, you may say, for someone with long-term depression. But that message has the unspoken assumption that they have nothing that anybody could possibly want. That is self-fulfilling, and it emphasises the current Catch-22 that we can only continue to access help by demonstrating designated 'problems'. Any signs of recovery - an interest in surroundings, a renewed excitement about the possibility of work - can cut you off from financial and medical support overnight. Worse, it is also profoundly mistaken - because feeling useful is such a basic human need. And one we deny wider and wider swathes of the community: young people, old people, people with mental health problems, unemployed people, and so on. The problem with this enforced passivity is that it is such a scandalous
waste. While we eke out the last few farthings for our public services,
and worry about whether they should be publicly or privately-run, we are
wasting the skills, talents, time and abilities of enormous numbers of
people - people who might worry about their ability to give, but who often
desperately need a role to play. What can we do about it? One answer is to provide a system, anywhere from doctor's surgeries to housing estates, that allows people to provide each other with mutual support - not one-way volunteering, but something that allows almost anyone to contribute. That's the thinking behind the newly-launched London Time Bank, which will eventually support a whole network of time banks across the capital - each one encouraging people to earn 'time credits' for helping out in the community, and spend them when they need help themselves. Based on similar community time banks, now mainstream in the USA, Japan and China, people affiliated with the London Time Bank will also be able to use their 'credits' to access refurbished computers. Or, as they already can in Peckham, get into the local sports centre. Experience of the 20 or so time banks already up and running around the country shows that they can improve the sense of local trust, build self-esteem, help people with depression by reconnecting them to their local neighbourhood. In short, to rebuild communities relationship by relationship. By measuring and rewarding what people give, they attract a whole new group of people who have never volunteered - and possibly never would. The London Time Bank plans to link at least 40 together over the next three years, which means London will have a second 'currency', based on time, with the power to rebuild communities and local trust wherever it circulates - and which will be able to be spent also on training, recycled furniture, and maybe eventually public transport. It will save public money not by cutting services, but by making them more effective. Take the community time bank in the Rushey Green Group Practice in Catford, for example. If doctors think patients need a friendly visit once a week, rather than their usual pills - or if they think they would benefit from being more active in the community - they can refer them to the time bank. The result is not just a broader view of health. The time banks turns patients into equal partners with the doctors in the business of delivering health. Time banks in one group of hospitals in Richmond, Virginia which paid asthmatics in time credits to organise telephone advice and befriending, found they were able to cut the cost of treating asthma by over 70 per cent in two years. Using people's time can unleash enormous resources. But it does require some of the professionals to 'let go' - to define their patients according to what they can do, rather than just according to what they can't do. And it does mean institutions find they are in a wholly different relationship of equals with their clients. Does it matter any more, in those circumstances, if the service uses public or private money to reach its goals? NHS, housing or schools that have magically become equal partnerships in this way - by making use of people's time - are mutuals. We know that traditional forms of mutualism failed to do motivate people - and perhaps that's not surprising considering how little they felt involved. Time banks and the new mutualism don't have ownership at their heart. They have participation at their heart, and a new definition of work. Mutual participation without ownership can be exploitative, and the London Time Bank is going to have to stick closely to the original vision to avoid that. But mutual ownership without participation is a meaningless lie, just as it was with nationalisation. It's not the owning, it's the taking part. Because only by taking part as equal partners in our institutions do we get any kind of meaningful control over them. The future of our public services is going to be reciprocal, because it's the only way we can make them effective. ·David Boyle is an associate of the New Economics Foundation. Their Time Banks Manifesto is now online at www .londontimebank.org.uk |