Timebanking Week '22 - So Much to Celebrate!
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This March was the 4th Annual International Timebanking Day, and the Silver Spring Timebank expanded its own celebration into a week (plus an extra weekend, for a very full nine-day week). Why the extra time? We have so much to celebrate! It’s our 7-year anniversary. We have hit the 400-member mark. And we have adapted successfully to the limitations from the pandemic, finding ways to continue our service exchanges and social events, in order to stay connected.
Though we are saddened by the passing of “Father of Timebanking” Edgar Cahn in January, we celebrate him, too. His ideas, his work, and his enthusiasm, kindness, and dedication have improved lives all over the world, and we, in Silver Spring, were lucky enough to have him as a friend and close neighbor in D.C. What better way to honor Edgar this week -- and celebrate our own timebank’s milestones -- than to send the number of service exchanges through the roof!
Edgar Cahn with SSTB member Tina Slater.
To that end, we held two events on Timebanking Week’s opening day, to help members set up exchanges for the coming week. We’ve learned that one of the best ways to make “matches” for timebank exchanges is to put people together in real time and talk about what we need and what we can do. Invariably, someone needs a service that another member can provide but would never have thought to offer. The person-to-person connection is also a big help: When a delightful member describes her difficulty in picking up fallen branches in her yard, it’s easy to agree to help, even if that’s a task some of us would normally try to avoid. Another catalyst for exchanges is a fun challenge: to start with the person, not the task – meaning, you meet and get to know another member and make a list of all the possible exchanges you two can think of to do together. In the first of our Opening Day Zoom events, we came up with ten exchanges among us that we thought we could do during the week.
An opening day Zoom event at the start of Timebanking Week.
Other members also posted many new and interesting offers, such as car-buying tips, strength training, help with diversity study circles, creation of adult-size hula hoops, and delivery of fresh herb transplants. Plus the historically popular cooking, raking, sewing, airport rides, and practicing French.
But how to motivate our busy members to do those exchanges during Timebanking Week, rather than in the weeks after? We offered bonus hours for doing at least 7 exchanges of any duration (to celebrate the SSTB’s 7th anniversary) and for doing a total of at least 400 minutes’ worth of exchanges (to celebrate the SSTB’s 400-member milestone). Such a high bar, even for a nine-day week! But some reached it: One motivated person did 14 exchanges with 7 different members!
We wound up the week with a final event: an extra special Virtual Social, featuring a panel of the founders of the SSTB, reminiscing about the beginning and the evolution of the timebank and inviting ideas about where we might go next. (Read more about it in “Looking Forward, Looking Back: SSTB Social Celebrates our Own Lucky Seven.”) Let’s continue that dialogue together as we move into year #8!