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Article: Time to reward active citizenship: drawing on a study of the operation of the Fair Shares `time bank' in Gloucestershire--an early UK example of a US initiative that uses `time' to reward civic engagement--Colin C. Williams looks at whether the initiative is more widely transferable to the rest of the UK. (feature).
- Article from:
- Town and Country Planning
- Article date:
- June 1, 2002
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Town and Country Planning Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Currently, governments can only call for greater `civic engagement', `self-help', and `community involvement'. They have no means of rewarding active citizenship. Consequently a key question for policy-makers is whether those active citizens who hold communities together by helping others can be rewarded in some way. One potential solution, originating in the USA, has started to receive attention in the UK.
During the mid-1980s, Edgar Cahn, a Washington lawyer, developed the idea of `time dollars' in order to give society a way of rewarding people for undertaking socially useful activities to which the market economy assigns no value. (1) His twin objectives ...