This session is essentially about the key messages on timebanking and what things you need to consider before starting up your own time bank within your community or organisation.  The talk will include the answers to questions:

•             What is timebanking?

•             How does it work?

•             Who can benefit and how?

•             What do you need to consider when thinking about setting up a time bank or incorporating timebanking within an organisation?

•             How does organisational timebanking work?

•             An overview of the NEW timebanking software.

There will be plenty of time for questions throughout.

Timebanking UK is the umbrella organisation for the promotion and development of all types and models of Timebanking in the UK. It is a membership organisation and offers advice, guidance and support to time banks, public services and voluntary organisations in developing and managing new applications. It provides a national voice for timebanking, raises public awareness, lobbies policy makers and commissions research. Timebanking UK supports a strong and independent network of time banks across the country with a membership of around 300 time banks in the UK with 35,000 members having exchanged over 2 million hours.

SARAH BIRD BIOG

Sarah Bird is the CEO of Timebanking UK and has over 10 years of experience within the timebanking field, having originally set up and run a time bank, to becoming a consultant and project manager within TBUK. Sarah continues to develop partnerships and networks across the country with the vision of coproduced timebanking being present in every town and city in the country. She firmly believes that it brings a wealth of benefits to individuals and neighbourhoods focussing on the assets that people have and providing a way in which those assets can be shared and utilised. Sarah delivers talks, presentations and training days across the country facilitating regional networks as well as managing the indispensable Associate Trainers and Consultants that are part of Timebanking UK.

The precariat, consisting of millions facing insecurity, unstable labour and loss of rights, is alienated and angry.

Throughout history, class-based revolt has led to charters of demands, from the Magna Carta to South Africa’s Freedom Charter. It is time for a Precariat Charter.

Reviews from his most recent book:

‘Guy Standing has elaborated a brave and imaginative program that could bring protection to the denizens of the world and save us all from the destructiveness of neoliberal capitalism.’
– Michael Burawoy, University of California, Berkeley, USA

‘His call for “social empathy” in politics offers an important corrective to decades of neoliberalism, while his demand for rethinking the nature of work rightly seeks to undo centuries of damaging thought.’
 – Natalie Bennett, Leader of the Green Party of England and Wales

‘The only way for politicians to get ahead of the curve is to consider such ideas seriously. We must dare to give a real meaning to human rights and the concept of economic democracy in the twenty-first century.’
– Laszlo Andor, European Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion

SHORT BIOGRAPHY

 Guy Standing is Professor of Economics at SOAS, University of London, and was previously Professor of Economic Security at the University of Bath and Professor of Labour Economics at Monash University in Melbourne. Before that, he was Director of the ILO’s Socio-Economic Security Programme (1999-2005) and Director of the ILO’s Labour Market Policies Branch.

 An economist, with a Ph.D. from Cambridge University, and a Master’s Degree in industrial relations from the University of Illinois, he is a founder and co-President of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), an NGO promoting basic income as a right, with members in over 50 countries. He has been adviser and consultant to many international agencies, including the UNDP, UNICEF, World Bank, European Commission and DFID, as well as many governments and trades unions. In 1995-96, he was research director for President Mandela’s Labour Market Policy Commission, when he co-authored, with J.Sender and J.Weeks, Restructuring the Labour Market – The South African Challenge.

 Recent books are The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (Bloomsbury, 2011), Social Income and Insecurity in Gujarat (Routledge, 2010), and Work after Globalization: Building Occupational Citizenship (Elgar, 2009). The Precariat has been translated into ten languages, including Italian (published by Il Mulino).

 He is currently working on a large-scale pilot basic income scheme in India, and has been working for 15 years with SEWA, the union representing women ‘informal’ workers across India. His latest book, published in April 2014, is A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens (Bloomsbury).

Burke and Paine and Two Forms of the Constitution

In the second half of the eighteenth century Britain was the venue for a wide-ranging debate about the nature of constitutional government. Central to this debate were Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke. Paine’s argument that a constitution only exists when it is given a written form persuaded almost all the world. But Burke’s temperamental and traditional constitution survived in Paine’s birthplace Britain. As Scotland contemplates a future as a normally constituted nation, perhaps it is time the English looked again at the idea of the constitution.

Dan Hind was a publisher for ten years. in 2009 he left the industry to develop a program of media reform centered on public commissioning. His journalism has appeared in the Guardian, the New Scientist, Lobster and the Times Literary Supplement. His books include The Threat to Reason, The Return of the Public and The Magic Kingdom. He lives in London.

In this meeting we will debate the controversial “Special Expenses” taxation which Lewes District Council is adding to people’s Council Tax bills in the Town of Lewes.  Where the expense of looking after Lewes District Council open spaces was spread evenly between all council tax payers across the District, proximity to the open spaces is now the measure used to calculate the charge, so Lewes Town residents are going to be paying the whole bill for the spaces near their homes”  Ruth O’Keeffe the Independent Town, District and County Councilor will be joining us..

The UK is in the midst of a housing crisis to compare with the periods after the two world wars.  However, this time, it’s not bombs and lack of materials and labour that has caused the problem, but the consequences of the 1980’s Right to Buy policy coupled with vastly inflated land values.

 At the same time, we have a crisis of community, where trust has been lost within and between the generations, and inequality is growing ever more quickly, leading to a heightened sense of anomie.

 To put the tin lid on it, conventional construction and development models are completely unsustainable in the context of climate change and dwindling natural resources.  

What are we to do?  In particular, what does all this mean for Lewes in the 21^st Century?

 Andrew Simpson is an experienced planner and mental health worker, with a particular interest in the impact of place on health and well-being.  As well as recently securing a planning consent for a new urban village in south-west London, Andrew is a director of the Lewes Community Land Trust. 

 Andrew will lead a discussion on Lewes in the 21^st Century in the context of the impending submission of a planning application for the largest development that Lewes has seen in recent times, the proposed new North Street Quarter on the Phoenix site.  He will propose that unless the town builds on its tradition of co-operative ownership and direct citizen participation, Lewes will drift towards becoming a commuter dormitory clone town, the death of Lewes.  Andrew hopes that the meeting will be part of the process of coming up with some practical solutions that can be taken forward in the next phase of the town’s development as sustainable Lewes.

The Prison Reform Trust is a leading independent charity working to create a just, humane and effective penal system. It produces information, conducts applied research and effects policy leverage. It provides the secretariat to the All Party Parliamentary Penal Affairs Group. The Prison Reform Trust’s advice and information service responds to over 5000 prisoners and their families each year. The charity has a good track record of achieving policy and practice change and, in the last five years, has helped to reduce child imprisonment by 40% in England and Wales.

Juliet Lyon CBE is director of the Prison Reform Trust, secretary general of Penal Reform International and vice president of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP). Voted Britain’s ‘Most Admired Charity Chief Executive’ in 2011, previously Juliet worked in education, mental health and justice.

We expect political democracy. Why not economic democracy too?

Peter Tatchell argues that Britain is an economic dictatorship. It’s time the economy was democratised to bring it into closer democratic alignment with the political system: employee & consumer directors on the boards of private and public institutions, employee control of pension funds, employee share issues for increased productivity and the legal right of employees to buy out their companies and turn them into cooperatives.

About Peter Tatchell:

Peter was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1952. He has been campaigning since 1967 on issues of human rights, democracy, civil liberties, LGBT equality and global justice. His human rights inspirations include Mohandas Gandhi, Sylvia Pankhurst, Martin Luther King and, to some extent, Malcolm X and Rosa Luxembourg.

In 2009, he co-proposed a UN Global Human Rights Index, to measure and rank the human rights record of every country – with the aim of creating a human rights league table to highlight the best and worst countries and thereby incentivise governments to clean up their record and improve their human rights ranking.

He coordinated the Equal Love campaign from 2010, in a bid to challenge the UK’s twin legal bans on same-sex civil marriages and opposite-sex civil partnerships. The following year, he organised four gay couples and four heterosexual couples to file a case in the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that sexual orientation discrimination in civil marriage and civil partnership law is unlawful under Articles 8, 12 and 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

He has proposed an internationally-binding UN Human Rights Convention enforceable through both national courts and the International Criminal Court; a permanent rapid-reaction UN peace-keeping force with the authority to intervene to stop genocide and war crimes; and a global agreement to cut military spending by 10 percent to fund the eradication of hunger, disease, illiteracy, unemployment and homelessness in the developing world.

We will meet at 8pm in:

Elephant And Castle
White Hill
Lewes
BN7 2DJ

In the second half of the eighteenth century Britain was the venue for a wide-ranging debate about the nature of constitutional government. Central to this debate were Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke. Paine’s argument that a constitution only exists when it is given a written form persuaded almost all the world. But Burke’s temperamental and traditional constitution survived in Paine’s birthplace Britain. As Scotland contemplates a future as a normally constituted nation, perhaps it is time the English looked again at the idea of the constitution.

About Dan Hind:

Dan was a publisher for ten years. in 2009 he left the industry to develop a program of media reform centered on public commissioning. His journalism has appeared in the Guardian, the New Scientist, Lobster and the Times Literary Supplement. His books include The Threat to Reason, The Return of the Public and The Magic Kingdom. He lives in London.

Peter Luetchford and Jeff Pratt discuss their latest work on the politics and values of social movements.

About Peter Luetchford:

Peter has a long term interest in ethical and political ideas in relation to the economy.

Doctoral research into fair trade was based on anthropological fieldwork in Costa Rica among coffee cooperatives, farmers, and workers. This work, published in the book ‘Fair Trade and a Global Commodity: coffee in Costa Rica’ (Pluto 2009) and in book and journal articles, show people and organisations at the production end engage with fair trade and how the preferential deals are understood and negotiated within longer term commitments, strategies, and understandings of the market and economy.

More recently he has been concerned with ethical consumption, and particularly how fair trade is represented to consumers and the ways this departs from and obscures practices that are central to coffee production. This interest has led to collaboration with James Carrier and their co-edited volume ‘Ethical Consumption: social value and economic practice’ (Berghahn 2012).
About the book:

Concern about our food system is growing, from the costs of industrial farming to the dominant role of supermarkets and recurring scandals about the origins and content of what we eat.

Food for Change documents the way alternative food movements respond to these concerns by trying to create more closed economic circuits within which people know where, how, and by whom their food is produced.

The contributors explore the key political and economic questions of food through the everyday experience and vivid insights of farmers and consumers, using fieldwork from case studies in France, Spain, Italy and England. This book is an insightful consideration of connections between food and wider economic relations and draws on a rich vein of anthropological writing on the topic.

About Jeff Pratt:

Jeff joined the anthropology department at the University of Sussex in 1976 after research in Italy, primarily on the effect of the Cold-War on everyday political and cultural life.  While continuing to publish work on political movements he also developed an interest in rural transformations, land-reform, the industrialisation of agriculture and the spread of market relations (The Rationality of Rural Life, 1994). More recently he has returned to these issues, and specifically how small farmers try to create livelihoods outside the mainstream food chain, and find customers for what they produce. This has involved renewing research contacts in Tuscany, as well as joint work with Peter Luetchford, in Andalusia and in writing ‘Food for Change’. Although food is the focus of the research, we have framed the arguments in terms of more general questions, both about the kind of politics these movements represent, and the way people in their everyday lives negotiate the relationship between money and other kinds of value.