cc99 - financing feasibility

 

As project funding is often a problem, it is good to be prepared with another approach using our own resources. While cc development should readily adopt any appropriate source of funding - grants, loans, lottery winnings, whatever - it is a fundamental contradiction that a money system that really works should need ongoing subsidy.

If a lack of funding is an impediment to opening cc development, then starting with a community way feasibility study to raise that funding makes sense. It is a strong demonstration of the power of the concept if you can cause money to appear from a hat you have just presented.

 

Outline for a community way feasibility study

Suppose you are attempting to start a community way program in your community. Suppose there is some interest developed with community services organizations, and some business - but:

and therefore little is happening. And since no demonstration of community way yet exists, prospective participants have concerns.

 

In such situations, a feasibility study for a few core organizations and businesses, scaled at around 10% of a full community way level, can test:

 

One product of the initiative is the core of a revolving loan fund (rlf) and a demonstration of how that core can be expanded. It is also a means to provide a very simple and safe way for business to test the idea, and thus an easy way to broaden the program.

 

The first step is to find a community service organization (cso) that would like a revolving loan fund (rlf) and a major merchant (mm), or several of them, willing to sponsor that rlf. The mm(s) should already be, in principle, interested in participation in a full scale community way model, within which their initial donations over three months would be around 10% of current monthly staff costs. Their concerns about the scale of such a commitment can be addressed by a small scale trial under particular and controllable conditions.

The mm make donations of cw$ to the cso, specifically for foundation of rlf. Thus the rlf has, say, cw$10K - cw$25K as an opening asset.

The second step is the conversion of the cw$ to cash $, presumably first through cso associates and supporters, and then secondly through general public outreach. The key concern here is to achieve this part at minimum cost.

The cash thus received in exchange for cw$ is equally the asset of the rlf. This process is identical to the conversion of cw$ held by charities, and reinforces the equivalence of the cw$ to the conventional $.

 

Merchant guarantee

Some of the cash balance of the rlf is allocated to underwrite a merchant guarantee program. A group of selected businesses are given guarantees, carefully limited in time and scale, that the cw$ they earn in the program can be exchanged for cash $.

Thus they can try the program without cost, donation, or risk. This should lead to a wider range of businesses, so people can be more confident that they can easily spend their cw$. This will make the exchange process progressively more attractive to the public and easier for the cso.

 

The guarantee program is progressively phased out as the donation base expands.

  

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