Making money stick
Lessons from the Brixton Pound
I emerge from the Brixton Underground station just as the sun is setting. My senses are assaulted by dank city pollution, the drone of traffic dotted with red buses, and the garish signage of a Pound Shop. The road, flanked on both sides by chain stores, extends further than I am able to see. It wasn’t quite what I’d expected. My friend had given a different picture of life in Brixton.
She’s not expecting me for another hour and although she’s making us dinner, I know that whatever time she says it’ll be served, it’ll be three hours later. By then, we invariably will have drunk a bottle of wine between us. Experience tells my hungry body to get myself a snack. I shun a Café Nero in the hope of finding an independent shop. Already my nervous system is rejecting the sudden sensory overload; I turn the corner in the hope of a semblance of tranquility in the chaos. The road is equally busy, but the chain stores give way to independent businesses. I’m about to go into a café, but hesitate when I realise it’s no ordinary coffee shop. A group of people tumble out into the cooler night, followed by a member of staff who ushers me in. “Don’t mind the prices on the sign, we close in half an hour, but we’ve still got coffee going, as much as you can drink, and if you need a workstation, plug in.”
“Do you have anything to eat?”
“Light snacks, sarnies, panini…”
I agree to stay. It’s warm, it’s friendly and it’s not a Starbucks.
I hang my coat on the back of a chair, sit down and plug in my laptop. As I wait for it boot up I peruse the menu and their information. The café is called Caya and has only recently opened. It provides individual and group workstations, providing “an office without the politics, a kitchen table without the procrastination”. It’s owned and run by a cooperative and for £9 for a morning or afternoon (or £16 for the whole day), you get all the coffee you can drink while working. Food is extra, but cheaply priced for a London venue. I sip on good coffee while I google how far my friend’s home is from where I am, trying to decide whether to walk or taxi the last part of the journey.
When the staff member comes back with my panini he offers to call a taxi should I need one. The service they link to is community owned - it operates like a carpool and is a way of getting local people around the city village more conveniently and cheaply. I had planned to walk off the effect of sitting on a train for the last few hours, but am curious. This is more like the Brixton my friend had told me about.
Brixton is a transition town and eight years earlier had set up its own currency, the Brixton pound, worth the same as a British pound. Its mantra was “money that sticks to Brixton”.
They want to preserve the area's unique identity, foster community spirit, strengthen local bonds, and defend local businesses from the onslaught of chain stores by paying for goods and services with the local money. They also want to cut down on food miles and would like their traders to source goods locally.1
Caya is one of those operations which makes use of local produce in the lunches it offers.
The Brixton pound was ailing even a short while after its launch. The notes were difficult to bank, few people used them, and buying local was more problematic than conceived. Inner-city London isn’t rural Totnes, Lewes or Stroud, which also have their own currencies, but where most goods could be sourced from the local area. How do you offer locally-produced coffee?
While the Totnes currency stabilised and enjoyed longevity, one researcher stated he’d be reluctant to recommend a repeat of the Totnes trial. However, he wasn’t against the concept of local currencies per se, just the paper-notes version. Shortly after the launch of the Brixton pound, the first international study into the ‘new economics’, i.e. grassroots currencies, was underway, with a view to learning about their role in more sustainable economies. These took the form of mutual exchange, service credit, local currency and barter economies. In 2012, half were growing, but more than a quarter were in decline. The highest growth rates were in North America and Europe. They were all used in the context of sustainable development, though their aims differ. For example, in South America, the vision was empowerment and social justice, in Europe and America, to reduce food miles, support local business and build social networks. Some were more technologically advanced and others worked with existing political structures to widen participation.2
While local notes, are symbolic and help organise a town around a common identity (Brixton notes feature the portraits of historic local residents such as Vincent Van Gogh), digital currencies have more scope. Brixton never gave up on its pound. It instead established a digital platform to work across the mobile phone network and in 2021 it planned to:
“… reinvent the Brixton Pound, layering all we have learned in the last decade onto Algorand’s unique blockchain. Open source, trustless3 and inclusive, it’s an ecosystem developed solely to deliver public good.”4
Up until then, Brixton boasted a micro-grant scheme, a local lottery and funded a pay-as-you-feel/can surplus food café. As to how the new version of the currency will fair is now a matter of wait-and-see. One problem facing researchers is lack of hard evidence to make good recommendations for grassroots currencies in the future, recommendations that show the exact features which would enable a local currency to work in the longer term. As they arise out of informal networks, more formal track and trace systems rarely operate.
However, in one town, they questioned how feasible it was to create an entirely self-sufficient town with some practical data behind the answer.
A couple of years after Incredible Edible was established in Todmordon, the local food economy was investigated through a single product - eggs. The average person in Todmorden eats 3 eggs a week. With a population of 15,000, the local demand for eggs is approximately 45,000 eggs a week. That’s a lot of eggs. How do you ensure local production meets that demand?
In Todmorden, a campaign was launched - Every Egg Matters, which began first with a survey, and then with an egg map of homes, small-holdings, farms and shops selling local eggs. The map showed they were meeting one sixth of the local demand for eggs. They also established a support network for those keeping or wanting to keep chickens. This included two local schools.
Most eggs were available at small production sites - the farm gate. To meet local demand, they’d need to scale up and get eggs onto the aisles of local supermarket chain stores. They reasoned it was entirely possible with a mobile co-operative of five producers with about 150 hens each. To get the model implemented, however, would mean paying more for your eggs than supermarkets generally offer them for.
If you are a large commercial operation, then subsidies help to keep the price down. If the same support was given to smaller, ethical producers, both the consumer and the farmer would benefit.
And ethically produced eggs do not have to be more expensive.
A few years ago, I read a blog about an organic farmer in the US who keeps chickens (both for meat and eggs). She calculated her own eggonomy by conducting a cost analysis of chickens raised conventionally compared to outdoor-reared chickens. Even taking loss of chickens to predators into account (a 5% higher rate of loss when free-range), it was less costly to keep free-range than conventional chickens, as she saved on the expense of feed and energy costs. The added advantages, such as less stressed chickens, garden pest control, and manure, a decrease in overall farming costs, and the result of a higher quality product to take to market.
If it is feasible for town with a population of 15,000 to become self-sufficient in eggs, then what other product demands could it supply?
I leave Caya Café, and take advantage of more local business recommendations to purchase a bottle of wine and a gift to bring my friend. I arrive, not in a black cab, but a community-owned car.
Dinner was late - as usual.
Up Next
Next week, we’ll take a peek into a cooperative business as a way of thinking about a different way to be.
Embers
A while back, I asked if any of The Fiertzeside posts impacted on your behaviour in any way. Feedback showed that some posts had helped, in many ways, to clarify on-going thoughts which manifested in some small action. This week, I was delighted to see The Fiertzeside got a mention.
loves Mexico, so had a particular interest in my (clarion) post about the revival of chinampas for farming in Mexico City. She’s hoping to visit, and I’m hoping we get to hear about what she learns. In the post she shares a beautiful painting of Maria Féliz. If the name is unfamiliar, Joyce provides enlightening insight.I also empathise with her experience of learning to speak a different language.
Thank you, Joyce!
For more on what trustless means in the context of crypto currencies see: https://www.techopedia.com/definition/trustless
When I first moved to this isIand, I got involved in Transition Whidbey, our version of a Transition Town. We wound up winding it up, not because it failed, but because it was redundant. We are so rich in community organizations. We did talk about a currency, Whidbey Bucks, but it never quite took off.
This month I'm giving four talks on water, two to farming groups, and tonight I'll be part of a conversation on making the island more bicycle friendly. Many of these conversations include people I first met at TW. The transition spirit lives on!