An alternative currency based on sweat equity is set to launch in Philly

The new money, called Commons Community Currrency, can be used to purchase necessities like food, shelter and clothing, as well as exchanged as payment for local services like tutoring a neighbor's kid.

Bob Fishman with new currency notes.
Maria Pouchnikova

Over the clatter enveloping us at a Fairmount Avenue coffee shop, Bob Fishman invites me to consider the limits on the earning power of an everyday laborer.

"If the laborer cannot find somebody who wants to buy their hours for the week, they cannot charge two times their labor the next week to make up for it," he says, pausing in between bites of a chocolate brownie. Right, I reply. And that's Fishman's point, as well as the reason he's holding four notes of an alternative form of money called Commons Community Currency in his hand.

"The person who has official currency can earn money on the money, so they have an advantage over those dealing with goods and services," says Fishman, ending his impromptu lesson.

What Fishman was referring to is the interest-bearing nature of the U.S. dollar, the cornerstone of an American economic system he believes doesn't do much to benefit local communities. What's needed, he figures, is an alternative currency (in addition to the U.S. dollar), one that people can use to purchase necessities like food, shelter and clothing, as well as exchanged as payment for local services like tutoring a neighbor's kid. New-Age barn raising, it might be called, courtesy of slips of paper in denominations of ones and fives under the aegis of Fishman's nonprofit, Creativity in Human Design, which has raised about $1,000 to cover the cost of printing notes and repacking excess foods to be sold.

To start, Fishman and Commons Community Currency director Leah Oliver-Brown have printed 1,000 notes, which they'll start distributing in late January.

The idea would sound farfetched had it not been for Fishman's work launching and promoting another alternative currency, called Equal Dollars, which he introduced to Philadelphia in 1996.

In 1970, Fishman, a Bala Cynwyd resident, founded the Germantown-based Resources for Human Development (RHD), a nonprofit that now provides human services in Pennsylvania and 12 other states for various groups of people, including the homeless and the developmentally disabled. Later on, as CEO of RHD, Fishman made Equal Dollars the foundation of his vision for a "solidarity economy" in the City of Brotherly Love — one where the value of a person's sweat equity trumped the value of what could be earned through loans or interest with U.S. currency. Since Equal Dollars was non-interest-bearing, it behooved no one to hold onto large supplies of the currency for extended periods of time.

"People who cannot sell their labor for a day ... they lose the value of their labor," Fishman told me during a phone conversation last summer. "And if they are only able to be paid in official currency, they are at a point where the owner of the interest-bearing currency can lend their currency to somebody else, make interest on it and not give it to the laborer.

That means if we don't have another way of buying and trading, then we're totally dependent on one kind of currency that can reward its owners for not feeding or housing other people."

Over 19 years, nearly 5,000 Philadelphians used Equal Dollars as a means to earn money for menial jobs — cleaning vacant lots, refurbishing bikes, running errands for sickly neighbors — and as a way to purchase what they really needed, like food, clothing and, in some cases, apartment housing. Around 500,000 notes of Equal Dollars had been issued by 2014, and were used to purchase necessities at 25 businesses around Philadelphia. At its apex, the equivalent U.S. dollar value exchanged in terms of goods and services people managed to buy with Equal Dollars in a year hovered around $2.5 million.

In fall 2013, Fishman retired from RHD, ending his 43-year tenure as CEO. By March 2014, RHD abruptly announced that Equal Dollars would be going out of circulation due to funding issues. The nonprofit had been using $300,000 of its nearly $230 million in annual revenues to keep Equal Dollars in circulation and maintain certain services, like paying for pickup and delivery of excess groceries and foodstuffs to the Equal Dollars Food Market. By the end of June, the Equal Dollars bank had closed. By July, the market — where four tomatoes would go for less than one U.S. dollar — was no longer accepting Equal Dollars. Sara Reed, community relations manager for RHD, says the nonprofit doesn't know of any businesses or individuals still accepting Equal Dollars as payment. "That doesn't mean that it's not happening," she said in an email in late November. "If there is still trading happening in the city, it is probably very limited." In any event, no new notes of Equal Dollars were issued after the March announcement.

Fishman says a disagreement within RHD over funding Equal Dollars, among other things, eventually led to his being pushed out of the organization. "We chose to move [Equal Dollars] along by using U.S. dollars. The corporation was very capable of doing that," he says. "All of that stopped when there was a coup that pushed me out of my position, and that's because other people disagreed with that." (RHD spokesperson Kevin Roberts declined to comment, but provided the RHD statements announcing Fishman's retirement and the nonprofit's decision to stop funding Equal Dollars.)

That's why Fishman is trying to reintroduce an alternative currency by launching Commons Community Currency. He and Brown have already lined up a distribution center, the Germantown Life Enrichment Center, where members of the currency's network can visit to purchase food that might have outlived a restaurant's or grocery's expiration date, but is nonetheless edible. They've had preliminary meetings with community groups in Norristown and West Philadelphia as well. The currency will operate in much the same way as Equal Dollars, with one key difference. Whereas it cost $10 to become a member of the Equal Dollars network and have 50 Equal Dollars credited to your account, there will be no fee for joining the Commons Community Currency network. But earning units of the currency will depend on completing community service hours at the Germantown distribution center: 25 units for up to four hours of work, and 50 units for between four and eight hours.

"The only thing we expect is for people to be courteous and honest," says currency director Oliver-Brown, alluding casually to what Fishman describes as the occasional "special arrangements" that popped up during the days of Equal Dollars: for instance, volunteers running the food market who would set aside extra grocery items — at no charge — for friends.

Whether a brand new alternative currency can survive, let alone thrive, is the question. Craig Borowiak says the success of any new alternative currency depends on the charisma and initial efforts of the founders. An associate professor of political science at Haverford College, Borowiak has been mapping the solidarity economy in Philadelphia — community gardens, credit unions, alternative currencies and the like — since 2010.

"A community currency, if it's going to maintain itself, is going to develop relationships between community members," he says. "How can it be institutionalized and sustained over time? That's going to be the real challenge."

It appears to be a challenge Fishman is excited to tackle head-on. A thin man of 79, he has almost a grandfatherly bearing: kind eyes peering from behind oval-shaped, wire-rimmed glasses; a goatee spotted with gray flecks; a slow, measured cadence when he speaks, and a voice that feels like a flannel blanket on a winter's night. Don't let it fool you — Fishman is out to make sure people get paid.

"We don't have to look far to find communities that are not helped by the present economic system and go into decline," he says during our talk at the coffee shop in November. "You can't make money on money? Screw them; they don't exist. ... We don't take that attitude. We need another system that moves into these communities in which we honor what we can bring to each other without having to make profit, without making money on money."

And, with any luck, without needing much in the way of U.S. dollars to keep a new Philadelphia alternative currency alive.