Original source URL: http://www.fourthcornerexchange.com/ Fourth Corner Exchange is a Sustainable Community Currency based in the Pacific Northwest USA, which operates throughout the USA and the world. Currently we have over five-hundred participating members, with branches in Washington, Oregon, Colorado, New Mexico, Ohio and California. We will soon be opening our first branch in British Columbia, Canada. Founded by Francis Ayley and a small group of friends in 2002, Fourth Corner Exchange formally started trading in January 2004. From those small beginnings we have grown to over five-hundred members, exchanging a large selection of goods & services throughout the Pacific Northwest, centered around Bellingham and Port Townsend. Our unit of currency is the 'Time Dollar', which we use in a somewhat different manner to Ithaca Hours and Time Banks. Our Time Dollars have many advantages over other local, complimentary and alternative currencies, and significant advantages over bank issued money. Our primary mission is to rebuild our communities through the use of an community currency. This currency is administered by the Fourth Corner Exchange management group. Here is our mission statement. At Fourth Corner Exchange, we are social entrepreneurs who recognize that our traditional money system creates serious social problems, which devastate our local economies by removing money from local communities and transferring it to large corporations and financial centers, leaving the people without a medium of exchange at a local community level. This stifles local trade, unnecessarily suffocating the local economies of thousands of communities throughout the USA (and the world), destroying their ability to exchange available goods and services, creating unemployment, poverty and a pervasive sense of disempowerment and despair. Our traditional money system destroys local communities by denying them adequate access to a universal medium of exchange, which is necessary to facilitate trade. There are strong arguments against the traditional money system that suggest we need monetary reform. There is also the debt problem. Visit the U.S. National Debt Clock to read about this. Local, alternative and community currencies replace the money drained away, allowing the people to continue trading the essentials of life. Fourth Corner Exchange Time Dollars cannot be removed from the communities in which they circulate, because the members issue Time Dollars as and when they need them by trading their goods and services within their communities. This is democratic money, issued in sufficiency by the people to meet all their local trading needs. Bank money is issued in scarcity for the private profit of the banks and multi-national corporations, who frequently act antisocially at a community level. When the next recession or depression hits the mainstream economy, our members will continue to trade as if nothing has happened. Fourth Corner Exchange Time Dollars are immune to the unstable perturbations of the mainstream economy. They retain their value and continue to perform their primary purpose of facilitating trade between members under all conditions and at all times. Traditional bank-issued money has never been capable of performing this simple social task. This has been its main failing. For more information please read these YES! magazine articles, view this Peak Moment Conversation or see our recommended reading list. To help spread the word about Fourth Corner Exchange, get our flyer here, and circulate it amongst your friends, family and neighbors. Tell them there is a clean, efficient and elegant alternative to bank-issued money. Join us today! Latest News: Fourth Corner Exchange Co-Sponsors the 6th Annual Subdued Stringband Jamboree. A Currency of Our Own. Article by Elizabeth Harris on the Port Townsend expansion of Fourth Corner Exchange. Please Note: You cannot join Fourth Corner Exchange without first attending a New Member Meeting, which we hold monthly in Bellingham WA, Port Townsend WA, and at intervals in Mt Vernon WA, Everett WA, Portland OR and elsewhere. See News & Events for the next meeting in your area. Use the information below to contact us. email: •••@••.••• PO Box 28815, Bellingham, WA 98228 € Phone: (USA) (360) 305-5048 Copyright © 2007 Fourth Corner Exchange Inc. All Rights Reserved. -- -------------------------------------------------------- Posting archives: historical: http://cyberjournal.org/show_archives/?lists=newslog recent: http://groups.google.com/group/newslog/topics Escaping the Matrix website: http://escapingthematrix.org/ cyberjournal website: http://cyberjournal.org How We the People can change the world: http://governourselves.blogspot.com/ Community Democracy Framework: http://cyberjournal.org/DemocracyFramework.html Moderator: •••@••.••• (comments welcome)
