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Debt
That's User-Friendly:
At New York's Womanshare,
the members pay their bills in skills
from Worth Magazine, April
1995 by Elizabeth Royte
Jane Wilson, 69 years old slipped
on an Oriental rug a year ago and sustained multiple fractures
of her pelvis and wrist. Doctors set her recovery
time at three months, but Wilson surprised them by taking only
six weeks. To what does she attribute her Herculean rebound?
Going into debt.
"We encourage debt," says a friend,
Diana McCourt, from her book lined apartment in the heart of
New York City's politically liberal Upper West Side. "It oils
the system."
The system is called Womanshare,
and it operates on a novel system of credits and debits.
Wilson and McCourt, sitting back against Guatemalan throw pillows
in McCourt's home, are happy to explain how the group started.
Four years ago, Wilson, a former caterer, and McCourt, 57, who
had just sold her wood-working business, were looking for "new
ways to be in the world". They began trading labor:
help with a dinner party in exchange for building a shelf.
"We were very comfortable with that," Wilson says. "Then
we began meeting in the mornings, with our oats and berries
and yoga, and we began telling friends."
Eventually, a plan for a "cooperative
skill bank" emerged. New members, they determined, would
list five resources (such as a computer or a car), five interests
(concerts, walking), and five skills (counseling, designing).
In action, it works like this: Sally needs a wedding cake.
She peruses her Womanshare "yellow pages" which are updated
four times a year, and finds Lucy, who bakes the confection
and gets three hours credit in the "bank." Lucy can then
trade in her credit for, say, three hours of psychotherapy from
Anna, or any of 180 available skills.
Womanshare currently has 80 members
who cross racial and socioeconomic lines and rage in age from
30 to 72. McCourt and Wilson believe they have room for
another 20 - women, that is. "Having just women was easier,"
say Wilson, "because men tend to take over". Women barter
out of need and more cooperatively," she adds. "It's not
tit for tat."
Womanshare has consciously not
imitated the market economy and assigned credits to skills.
And, perhaps surprisingly, no member has balked at the idea
that walking a dog for an hour has equal value to an hour of
private detective work. "That's a yuppie mentality, that if
you need it, you buy it." Says Wilson "But in the ‘90s, we feel
a need to come together and support each other. We're
looking for community again."
A central tenet of the group is
that women respect each other's time, whether they're caring
for plants, writing a will, or walk ing the dog. Or having
poetry read to them while their broken bones mend, which is
how Jane Wilson got better and fell into grateful debt.
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