TheBulletin.ca Journal of Downtown Toronto
By Joy Kogawa –
At a recent conference on climate change, experts and scientists declared unequivocally that catastrophic times are upon us. One physicist at the University of Toronto said it was already too late. The Titanic has hit the iceberg. Huge disasters of climate change have already arrived and more are inevitable.
Given this news, many of us on the deck of the Titanic, continue to dance and feast our lives away as usual while the waves quietly rise. For the moment we hold back the looming spectre. Others are attempting to create life rafts, breaking the deck chairs apart with bare hands, looking for ropes to tie them together. Still others are looking about bewildered and in despair, neither waltzing nor working. It is the latter category, people not in denial that I wish to address. I believe that the difference we are each able to make begins with the tiniest decision. It can be as life changing as an effort to befriend an enemy or as small as choosing to waste less water in the bath, turning off the light, recycling more carefully, using no pesticides or bleach, traveling by public transit, using community currency, living simply etc. One small deliberate act empowers us and propels us to further steps.
The forecast is that some people, perhaps some of our children and grandchildren, will survive. Those who do will need tools.
For the last 10 years I have been part of a world wide citizens’ action known as the community currency movement. Throughout the world, visionaries and pioneers are day by day, quietly, faithfully trying to build social and economic systems for improved community health. This may at some point, translate into a tool for community survival. The idea is simple: we can in our communities, create a form of money, based on co-operation and caring, rather than on scarcity and competition, based on community interest and not just self-interest.
If we can build such structures now, they may evolve into more effective tools for the children of the future. People in systems based on values of caring will have at the very least, a measure of community health and be more likely to develop the moral strength and inner resources with which to face the fearsome days ahead.
Around the world and in Canada, there are many different types of community currencies, like the LETS system started by Michael Linton on the west coast. In Toronto, we have the Toronto Dollar. At the moment, it is weak. But it is still alive. And in the powerful hands of the love that resides in the human condition, the system may yet become more visible.
My involvement with community currencies began in 1995 after the publication of my novel, “The Rain Ascends.” The last sentence of the novel (in its first edition) was, “The journey will lead into the abundant way.” I was wondering what that sentence meant, when a friend told me about community currencies. I began to explore the idea. I knew there was something deeply disturbing about our society’s obsession with money, with not having enough, with scrambling and competing for it. This way of life was far from the path of abundance. It was, in fact, a path of scarcity and of constricted hearts. I wondered if engagement with community currencies could lead to a healthier, happier mindset.
My former partner, John Flanders and I were for awhile vigourously engaged in trying to set up a LETS system in Vancouver, in which people exchange goods and services and the transactions are recorded on an accounting system. This enables people with little money to be engaged in economic activity. We held a number of meetings in homes, in community centres and churches and built up a list of participants. But we were unable to engage any businesses. And slowly, the system of accounting became unsustainable on volunteer labour and energy dissipated. After moving to Toronto, we met with some community-minded people in the St. Lawrence area in the historic commercial neighbourhood now called Old Town Toronto. For over a year with people coming and going, we studied various community currency systems, particularly Ithaca Hours which uses a paper currency. We discussed pros and cons and at one point, made a decision to leap in and learn by experiment and experience what we could not learn through discussion and study.
John had, in the meantime, initiated the forming of an umbrella organization called St. Lawrence Works, comprised of businesses, churches, community organizations, theatres and schools in the neighbourhood. The Toronto Dollar was adopted as one of the projects under this umbrella.
In 1998, we hired a designer, Steve Yeates, and printed $300,000 worth of Toronto Dollars in denominations of $1, $2, $5, $10 and $20 in green, pink, blue and yellow. This cost us about $5,000 that was provided as a grant by a friend. We based our design on a photograph of old Toronto and decided to use historic buildings on one side. Our bills contained serial numbers and our initial two printings both contained expiry dates. The most recent printing does not bear an expiry date.
Our plan was to exchange Toronto Dollars, for Canadian dollars at par with citizens: 10% of the Canadian dollars received would be placed in a community fund for the use of community organizations, 90% would be put aside for merchants and businesses who wished to redeem the Toronto Dollars they received from customers. Merchants also had the option of re-spending them with other businesses or using them as bonuses or in exchange for labour.
David Walsh, a philanthropist and well-known businessman, was well connected with both the business world and with community organizations. He became the first treasurer and did much of the arduous work of signing up businesses. The first business he approached was the Hot House Café, a highly successful restaurant which is owned by a very community-minded man, Andrew Laffey. David Walsh and I then approached Jorge Carvalho, who was managing the St. Lawrence Market: Jorge is an exceptionally visionary leader and he enthusiastically agreed to participate. He signed up most of his merchants in the market. And through the additional energy of Frank Touby, who with his wife Paulette own the local newspaper (formerly The Community Bulletin, and now The Bulletin ). many more businesses signed up. Both the Hot House Café and the St. Lawrence Market have continued to this day to be the most active partners.
In November of 1998, we held our first fund-raising event at the Church of the Holy Trinity, featuring a wonderful couple, Kristine Bogyo, a marvelous cellist and her husband, Anton Kuerti, Canada’s foremost concert pianist. That night, Anton Kuerti became the first person to engage in Toronto Dollar transactions by exchanging his CDs for Toronto Dollars.
In December, 1998, Toronto’s then mayor, Mel Lastman, launched the Toronto Dollar to much media attention in the St. Lawrence Market. In the years that followed, we continued to experience the Toronto Dollar as a “work in progress.” We held a press conference to publicize our first grant of a thousand Toronto Dollars to the Metropolitan United Church’s Out of the Cold program. We assisted in the staging of a number of highly publicized events, such as the Global Roots Festival, primarily in and around the St. Lawrence Market. With our volunteer participation, we assisted in the planning and execution of the first highly successful Customer Appreciation Night and Toronto Dollar party at the St. Lawrence Market, attended by 5.000 people, including media personalities and politicians. At this event we handed out small grants to about 20 community organizations. Governor General Adrienne Clarkson, as her first official public act, visited the Toronto Dollar booth and used Toronto Dollars. We held more fundraising concerts. We ran a Toronto Dollar Reading Series in a local restaurant. We held a press conference at the CIBC to announce their participation and their small grant. We initiated a “Count-me-in” campaign focusing on assisting the children attending the St. Lawrence Community Recreation Centre and managed to raise enough funds to enable children to attend camp in the summer.
Over the years we have evolved through many waves of energy. The Spirit at Work project engaged a number of community organizations using Toronto Dollars as thank-you gifts for people offering any form of caring services, such as helping to carry groceries home for an elderly person. We held monthly Toronto Dollar Supper Clubs with an average attendance of 40 people. We began an annual awards ceremony that featured the Frankly Bob Awards for excellence in literary and visual arts for survivors of long-term poverty. This has now been expanded to include music. There are also the Elaine Hall awards for the Caring Services, Social Justice awards, Jennifer literary awards, awards to merchants for their participation. Barbara Hall, our former mayor, has been handing out the awards every year. We currently have the use of a very large Outdoor Broadcast Network sign at the busy corner of Yonge and Richmond streets, through which we advertise our existence for 10 seconds every three minutes, 400 times a day.
Through personal donations and a Trillium grant we have from time to time hired staff to deepen and expand the concept. One of our staff, Elizabeth Verwey, was able to enlist the management of Gerrard Square Shopping Centre, east of the St. Lawrence Market. Several events were staged there to publicize the Toronto Dollar and for a while we had the participation of most of the businesses at Gerrard Square. But with the change of management, we no longer have their full participation. We were also briefly in another shopping centre in the west side of Toronto where two of our board members lived. They have since moved out of the city. Individual board members have also made sporadic attempts to spread in other areas but these initiatives lacked the dense community networking and the concerted effort that has been expended in our birthplace. We have had meetings with city councilors and staff, with officials of several banks, with neighbourhood organizations and in condominiums, cooperatives and other high-rise dwellings. Our core efforts have remained in the St Lawrence area. In my estimation, the relative success of our endeavours in the St. Lawrence Neighborhood has been dependent on long-term friendships and relationships that are established and have grown there.
Through these networks, the Toronto Dollar continues to be useful in a small way. For example, St. John’s Bakery regularly exchanges a thousand dollars every month and the Toronto Dollars are used to supplement the income of one of their employees, a single mother, who is a recipient of social benefits. Since Toronto Dollars is legally a gift certificate, people of low income who are recipients of social benefits are able to receive Toronto Dollars without being penalized. The potential for the St. John’s Bakery model to be duplicated by other businesses has been the driving vision behind the current “Single Mother’s Project” in St. Jamestown, where Barbara Bouck is working to establish a network of support with the hope of benefiting single mothers in the area.
In almost a decade of existence, we have had a number of executive and board members who have served with varying degrees of commitment as volunteers. We have also had the help of pro-bono lawyers at Baker McKenzie who assisted us with our legal needs, our incorporation and recently with the establishment of the Community Counts Foundation, a charitable arm of the Toronto Dollar.
At our most recent annual general meeting, the following executive was elected. Hugh Reilly, president, Himy Syed, vice-president, Jim Boyles, secretary and Richard Hotta, treasurer. We are hopeful that Toronto Dollar will benefit from the energy of the two new executive members, Hugh Reilly and Himy Syed and remain anchored by the proven commitment of Jim Boyles and Richard Hotta who renewed their terms. The addition of new board members: David Burman, the founder of Toronto’s LETS system and one who has been for many years connected to the world wide community currency movement; Judith Lowther, a retired school principal; and Scott Finan, a printer, are also reasons for hope.
At present, Toronto Dollars can be obtained during the week from one branch of the CIBC, from the restaurant, C’est What, and the Smoke and Gift Shop in the St. Lawrence Market. On Saturdays, between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m., volunteers exchanging Toronto Dollars are located at the Toronto Dollar booth in the lobby of the market. One of the volunteers, Dr. Maryan Koval’s’kyj, requested a number of years ago, that a special commemorative $5 bill be printed in memory of his granddaughter, Jennifer, who was murdered at the age of six. He has since printed new “Jennifer bills” in denominations of 10 and 15 Toronto Dollars and exchanges them every Saturday in the lobby of the St. Lawrence Market. His efforts account for almost half of our annual exchanges of approximately $100,000. We are at the moment, below this amount.
The work of the treasurer is indispensable to the existence of the Toronto Dollar and thanks to the dedication and loyalty of Richard Hotta, a chartered accountant and successful businessman, we continue to survive. Every second Tuesday, he redeems Toronto Dollars for the merchants, at the Market.
Our dream of enlivening the citizenry and local neighbourhoods, of building new economic and social bridges among different categories of people, and engaging community organizations with local businesses, has had only a very small measure of success and remains for the most part, a dream. It has, in many ways, been easier to gain the participation of businesses than of citizens. Only those with a pioneer spirit are willing to expend the extra time and energy it takes to obtain and use Toronto Dollars. We have lacked the ongoing publicity to create awareness of the ways Toronto Dollar benefits individuals and local communities. People are for the most part, trapped within the scarcity mindset and have little energy for volunteering to help. It is easier to wait for government to act and to walk by the homeless person than to help to build a system where such issues might begin to be addressed. But as we continue to survive, the idea that we are not helpless and hopeless may enter a few minds, making the action of the Toronto Dollar part of the antidote to what has been termed, “the cult of impotence.”
In a world where religious fundamentalists demonize and wage war upon “others,” I believe we need secular tools to underscore our commonalities, our interdependence and our most basic and shared economic needs. Our local geographic communities house a great mix of many categories of people and in addition to schools, community centres and places of worship, Toronto Dollar is also a vehicle for developing familiarity and perhaps even understanding. Through the disciplined commitment of a small group of people, the vision remains a small light in one corner of one city. What I seem to be learning after all these years of labour, is that the Abundant Way is both an inner and outer journey and its rewards for me are friendship and hope.
Our phone number is 416 361 0466. Our address is Toronto Dollar Inc., Box 6523, Station A., Toronto, Ontario, M5W 1X4. Our website is www.torontodollar.com.
St. Lawrence Neighbourhood resident Joy Kogawa is known for her novels, poetry, essays, and activism. She was born in Vancouver in 1935. As a second-generation Japanese Canadian or Nisei, she has told the stories of Japanese-Canadians in her writing. Kogawa and her family were evacuated to Slocan, British Columbia and later to Coaldale, Alberta during the Second World War. She has also been involved in seeking redress from the Canadian government for the internment of 20,000 Japanese Canadians during World War II. She was made a Member of the Order of Canada. From 1983 to 1985 Kogawa worked with the National Association of Japanese Canadians. Under the War Measures Act in 1942, many Japanese Canadians had lost their property and possessions. Kogawa pursued studies in education at the University of Alberta and taught elementary school in Coaldale for a year. She then studied music at the University of Toronto followed by studies at the Anglican Women’s Training College and the University of Saskatchewan. In 1957, she married, had two children, and divorced in 1968. Joy Kogawa has published several collections of poetry, essays, children’s literature and the novels Obasan, Istuka, and The Rain Ascends. Obasan won several book awards; it focuses on Japanese Canadians and the injustices they experienced during and after the Second World War. The central character of this book is Naomi, who reappears in Kogawa’s children’s book, Naomi’s Road and again in Itsuka. The latter text concentrates on the emotional and political involvement of Naomi in the Japanese-Canadian redress movement. Kogawa’s novel, The Rain Ascends, deals with an emotional issue of a different kind: the sexual abuse of children by a Protestant clergyman. Her book length poem, A Song of Lilith published in 2001 is a collaborative work on the mythical figure of Lilith (Adam’s “first” wife).
