3DN CoPs
Certificate of Participation
- We have been looking for a currency to encourage contribution to new ways of interacting locally with a view toward healing nature and producing abundance. Our efforts are delayed in many respects by the confusion between currency and money. We search for a currency that measures things other than monetary value. The following description of a Certificate of Participation is a first effort to define such a currency within a specific set of transactions. (See: The First Base Pairs).
- I am working with a non-profit organization that has lined up land to be used to grow food. Originally, the plan was to employ the poor to grow the food but funding was lost and we are now talking about a modified “community garden” format using permaculture techniques. See: Permaculture in Denver Colorado
- In the typical community garden each participant rents a plot, tends that plot throughout the growing season, and owns whatever is harvested. Traditional gardening techniques and the watering systems I have seen require regular attention for weeding and watering. With the permaculture deep mulch technique combined with drip irrigation we eliminate the need for regular weeding and watering and the need for annual tilling. Instead, we can gather a group of people to build the beds, another group of people to plant the beds and finally, a group of people to harvest the beds. If we issued a certificate of participation equal to one hours work at any stage of the process, we could determine relative ownership of the food produced based on the number of certificates issued.
- Using the production and distribution of food as the “base pair” in combination with a non-profit devoted to developing systems to heal nature and produce abundance would allow a number of additional transactions. So far I have:
- 1) Sponsorships by companies in the industry – garden centers, equipment suppliers, irrigation suppliers – in exchange for publication of their sponsorship on the website and project sites.
- 2) Individual subscriptions to support particular projects – interest in - gardening, local resilience, carbon sequestration
- 3) Acceptance of CoPs at educational or entertainment events sponsored by the non-profit – permaculture techniques, canning and freezing, musical events, showings of the upward spiral
- 4) There are many organizations with worthy projects and I am thinking of a Kiva like website where we could take an administrative fee to raise funds for these other projects as well – some of which would benefit from issuing and accepting CoPs.
- In the event a project produced more food than will be used by the holders of CoPs for that project, the excess production would be available for sale for money. Another possibility is a transaction in which a restaurant agrees to accept CoPs and then uses the CoPs to acquire fresh produce from the project. A garden center could accept CoPs and give them out in a loyalty program.
- I am not sure that a non-profit can take us all the way to a community investment enterprise but it will be much easier to institute the initial transaction sets.
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