A Philadelphia community currency known as Equal Dollars recently loaned $25,000 to a national non-profit organization for use in expanding their services inside the community. Earlier this month, that company, the Resources for Human Development made their first installment payment of $1,000. According the original article,
RHD negotiated the loan from Equal Dollars Community Currency this summer, as it struggled to come up with a way to provide annual bonuses for its Central Office employees amid a tight budget in a lackluster economy. With the zero-interest loan, RHD paid bonuses of 100 Equal Dollars to each of its 250 headquarters workers.
But that was only the start of RHD’s efforts to make good on its promises to repay the loan. Next, it had to make sure its employees had meaningful goods and services on which to spend their new Equal Dollars. And it had to ensure that it somehow developed an income stream of Equal Dollars, so that it could satisfy its debt. The Equal Dollars bank does not accept U.S. dollars.
So RHD, a sprawling nonprofit with 160 people-helping-people programs in 13 states and with stakes in several for-profit socially conscious businesses, went to work.
It asked one of its for-profit spinoffs, Brothers’ Keepers Hope Improvement, which offers employment to ex-offenders, to pay rent in Equal Dollars for space it uses at RHD’s headquarters building.
Then it expanded a weekly vendors’ bazaar in which individuals offer everything from handmade crafts and clothing to personal hygiene items and household goods for a combination of U.S. and Equal dollars. Each of the vendors pays a fee to RHD in Equal Dollars in return for their booth and access to the consumers.
And, most significantly, RHD started a one-day-a-week produce market for the community in unused space in its basement. Stocked with fruits and vegetables donated by a large food wholesaler, the market exchanges family-pack bags of food for equal amounts of U.S. and Equal dollars, using the Federal Reserve bills to offset transportation and related costs and stockpiling the Equal Dollars to repay the debt obligation.
The produce market has become wildly popular, leading RHD to seek out other “end of commercial life” products that it can breathe a second life into and generate more Equal Dollars for corporate coffers and more savings of U.S. dollars for consumers.
