Currencies like the Bristol Pound support local retailers and build a sense of community, proponents say.
“Bristol Pounds stand for so many things that we do. It just made sense,” says Stacey Fordham, standing amid artisan cooking oils, natural wellbeing products and dispensers for pasta, grains, and pulses at her zero-waste shop, Zero Green in Bristol, England.
Her store is one of around 500 businesses in the city that accepts the Bristol Pound, Britain’s largest community currency.
What’s a community currency? It’s a special, local currency that can only be used within a certain locale at shops or other businesses that have signed up to accept it as an alternative to the official, national currency, with the goal of encouraging spending in the local economy. This can either encompass a whole town, or in the case of a currency like the Brixton Pound, just one London neighbourhood, and can be bought at a rate equivalent to the national British pound. There are thousands of community currencies in the world and the concept has been around for decades, and in the past couple of years, they’re becoming more popular as more have become digital.
“There is a strong relationship between unemployment and the size of complementary currencies,” says German economist Christian Gelleri, who founded the community currency called Chiemgauer that can be used in Germany’s Bavaria region. “One successful example in 2019 was the Sardex in Sardinia, with more than 3,000 businesses and a turnover of nearly €50m ($54.7m, £44.4m). The unemployment rate there was 15%. We had €6.3m turnover in [the currency] Chiemgauer, with an unemployment rate of 1.9%.”
