Tag Archives: timebank

10 creative community service ideas

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Opportunities to serve our communities are everywhere, and can take many forms. Some of the most popular community service ideas are rooted in volunteering with an existing organization—like a soup kitchen, school, or house of worship. We at ioby think this type of community service is stellar, and we applaud anyone who makes the time to get good done with an organization they love.

But we also know there are some that are moved to act by the unique issues in their own neighborhood, and want to imagine, build, and execute their equally unique community service ideas. That’s why we’ve been helping residents bring their good ideas to life for over 10 years. ioby’s community crowdfunding platform—and the expert fundraising support that goes with it—gives people the tools and information they need to raise the cash, awareness, and buy-in necessary to take the positive change they envision from idea to reality.

Below, we’re happy to share 10 of our (many) favorite ioby projects that illustrate how creative, fun, and impactful resident-led community service ideas can be.

Continue reading 10 creative community service ideas →

Awesome Project: Detroit’s Unity in Our Community TimeBank

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When you make a deposit in a TimeBank, you won’t have to worry about whether it’ll lose value over time. You won’t have to worry about bank robbers, or sky-high interest rates. That’s because the only things a TimeBank holds is time, and the tremendous promise of an alternative way of valuing work, community, and each other.

“Time banking is about thinking about our communities and our economy a little differently,” says Alice Bagley, Unity in Our Community (UOC) TimeBank’s coordinator. “Our money economy only tends to highly value certain kinds of work, and places very little value on things like checking in on our senior neighbors, or the wisdom that people with different experiences might have, or the important work of community building through things like game nights. But we also know that if those things all went away tomorrow then we would no longer have functioning communities.” Continue reading Awesome Project: Detroit’s Unity in Our Community TimeBank →

Recipe for Change Video: How to Start a Time Bank

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 Time banks are an amazing way for communities to share using time instead of money as currency.  The time bank movement is helping neighbors all over the country shift us away from economies based on consumption to economies based on relationships.

The concept is simple:

1. You spend 1 hour doing something for someone in your community

2. You earn one “time dollar” that goes into the time bank.

3. You spend your time dollar having someone do something for you and then

4. Repeat!

In this video, we present some simple tips and steps to starting a time bank in your own neighborhood.

This video was produced by Good Eye Video, in partnership with ioby and The Center for a New American Dream.

New Dream’s Get2Gether Neighborhood Challenge  (happening right now!) encourages neighbors from all over the U.S. to start new ways of sharing to build and transform communities, and timebanks are a great way   to start!

Visit our Vimeo page for more great videos on making change in your neighborhood.