This is a CTP of initiative: Hour Exchange Portland (USA)
Richard Rockefeller, the great grandson of John D. Rockefeller, was a physician in Maine. He practiced and taught medicine for almost 20 years in Portland. He was also a philanthropist and humanitarian and was actively engaged in several civil society organizations to address and improve environmental and societal conditions. In 1996 he established Hour Exchange Portland (HEP), supporting this financially and in many other ways. He also helped establish other time banks in Maine and New England. His original expectation was that once set up, time banks and their members would find ways to become self-supporting. This expectation was not realised during his lifetime and he was still supporting HEP and the Maine and New England time banks unto his passing. In 2014 he died unexpectedly at the age of 65 in a small-plane crash. His passing marked a turning point for the time banks he had established as, without his support and without effective business plans in place to fall back on, they moved from having sure support to struggling to cover core costs. They also missed the reputational support and credibility that came from association with Richard Rockefeller.
Richard Rockefeller’s philanthropy had a strong early focus on health and on environmental issues. He was a co-founder of Médecins sans Frontières. He supported environmental conservation projects and movements, but he became increasingly frustrated by the lack of political and public action to support conservation. After hearing Edgar Cahn speak about timebanking, he shifted his priorities, arguing that environmental protection was unlikely without first improving interpersonal relationships. Improving interpersonal relationships and building strong and inclusive communities on the basis of shared values therefore became his philanthropic priorities.
He established Hour Exchange Portland in 1996. Cahn’s speech inspired him to use Time Banks as means to support community building in Maine and New England, his home area. His ambition was to develop a network of interconnected Time Banks in his home region based around a central hub formed by HEP, his first time bank.
Richard Rockefeller provided funding for the general operating costs of HEP, initially foreseen to cover the start-up phase. The secure funding stream he provided enabled HEP to experiment and develop new ways or organizing to facilitate mutual aid within the local community. HEP became a US flagship Time Bank due to its unique financial situation, the influence and support that Richard Rockefeller brought through his contact networks, and his reputation. He contributed also to the establishment of the first US Time Bank membership organization, Time Banks USA (TBUSA), which was to promote Time Banks across the US and facilitate international cooperation.
Richard Rockefeller’s engagement and effort exceeded the financial dimension by far; he used his social and economic position to establish a board of directors for HEP bringing together influential people from across New England known within their community. Auta Main recalls:
“They were people of influence, they knew how to fund-raise, they knew how to encourage their bodies to support the Time Bank. Richard was able to bring that model because of the people he knew and he was just really one of the kindest people you would ever know. Extremely generous and very, very smart”.
During the late 1990s and early 2000s, timebanking spread across Maine, New England, nation-wide, and internationally, boosted by the support that Richard Rockefeller gave to the timebanking movement. Richard Rockefeller’s involvement and efforts helped the movement to grow rapidly. The financial and related support Richard Rockefeller provided helped establish Time Banks in Maine and New England as well as TBUSA, a membership organization for time banks. However, the financial stability this gave to the Time Banks took urgency away from their need to establish their own funding streams to provide for the period beyond receiving only grant and philanthropic funding support.
“In 2006 Richard had said ‘I'm going to fund this for maybe another three or four years, but beyond that...’ And he never thought he would be funding it for ever. That was not his plan. He thought that there would be a way to make them sustainable and that was always part of our goal and in our mind. This was probably very naïve of us, but we thought that the members could to it”.
Up to the point when Richard Rockefeller passed away unexpectedly in 2014 he was still funding HEP and other Maine and New England time banks.
His passing was totally unexpected and a huge loss on many different counts. Richard Rockefeller was very well liked and respected. He brought his reputation to timebanking and to HEP specifically. Auta Main comments: “This was a huge, huge loss. I've loved every second of my work with that organization and Richard”.
As HEP and the other Time Banks in the Maine and New England networks had not been able to develop a self-sustaining strategy with effective business plans by the time of Richard Rockefeller’s passing, a decline set in. Several Time Banks in the network have since closed. HEP has survived, but at lower levels of funding and activity.
The decline in HEP and the Maine and New England Time Banks was influenced by many factors alongside the sudden death of Richard Rockefeller.
The financial stability that Richard Rockefeller’s sponsorship provided had caused a false sense of security at HEP. The operational costs of HEP were covered by Richard Rockefeller’s generous donations and additional grants that had been won or in-kind resources, such as human resources coming through the AmeriCorps Vista programme, were invested in extending the Time Bank network across the State of Maine and to develop new service schemes. This unique financial backup had provided an immense freedom to experiment and diversify activities within the time banks.
In the beginning, Richard Rockefeller and those involved in HEP and the Maine and New England Time Bank networks felt that it would be possible for local Time Banks to develop own income streams. The intention was to start Time Banks and then to spin them off as self-funding activities. It was believed that all that was needed would be to have some full-time support over the first few years to get to this position. Auta Main says there was an awareness of the need to develop ways to ‘spin-off’ the time banks, but that the challenge was underestimated. “How do we spin this off on its own?” The first response was that, OK, we get this three-year AmeriCorps Vista person and they may develop a kitchen cabinet in their area with grassroots members and that will help them grow, think about partnerships, what they are going to do in their regions, and, then, that there would always be a couple of members that could do the coordination and keep it going. We really thought that this would be possible… I think we have learned that it really was not.”
In addition, as a separate development, tensions arose within TBUSA concerning Edgar Cahn and the governance of the organization and the timebanking movement. These arose in part over the governance of timebanking software and Cahn’s decision to charge members of time banks money dues and fees. Disagreements within TBUSA between Cahn and some Board Members led to an internal crisis during which several board members resigned. This can be construed also as a crisis around identity of the movement and its direction. This contributed eventually to the formation of hOurworld in2010, a cooperative company that provided a software, Time and Talents (TnT), as a free-to-use alternative to Community Weaver (v2). In the interim, the disagreements dampened down some of the positive energy that had built up around the timebanking movement, especially around HEP and the Maine and New England Time Banks. Several of those involved in HEP were involved in establishing hOurworld and its software. TnT was taken up at HEP.
The passing of Richard Rockefeller constitutes a critical turning point in the development of the US timebanking movement. He had been a committed supporter of HEP and friend to it and the Maine and New England Time Banks.
During the early phase of a nationwide expansion of timebanking many new Time Banks were established. Timebanking had increasingly won the attention of establishment actors, not least because of the involvement of Richard Rockefeller in the movement, which lent the movement credibility.
However, many foundations and grant awarding bodies – while willing to fund start-ups and to support trials and demonstration projects – are unwilling to provide repeat funding or to become long-term funders of individual organisations, which risks their underwriting the costs of an organization on a continuing and indefinite basis. There is therefore an expectation that social innovation and civil society organizations transition gradually from being wholly grant-funded to having more diversified forms of funding and even to becoming self-funding. Foundations increasingly also seek to assure that the organizations in which they invest have business plans and strategies in place for implementing these. Foundations and grant awarding bodies take these responsibilities increasingly stringently.
The passing of Richard Rockefeller meant both that the Time Banks he had supported financially and in many other ways lost the support he had provided and that the affected Time Banks faced significant challenges in seeking new sources of support. They were already long-established Time Banks, but (partly because they had been so financially secure under the generosity of Richard Rockefeller) they had not developed business models to provide for their own financial continuity and they lacked contingency plans.
By contrast, organizations that use Time Banks to achieve their mission but operate without assured philanthropic funding are forced to either develop viable business plans or to fail. Partners-in-Care (P-i-C) is an example of a long-lived mission-driven organization that uses the timebanking mechanism. As Partners-in-Care was independently established and had no benefactor, this issue of developing and implementing a business plan was confronted from the start and, very early on, P-i-C developed a business model that has provided the organization with a high degree of financial autonomy. This has enabled the organization to sustain and to be less vulnerable to losses of grant or foundation funding.
The philanthropy of Richard Rockefeller and his good intention and hard work in support of HEP and the Maine and New England Time Banks were appreciated. HEP and its board of directors were aware of his generosity. “They decided that they should host a party to thank Richard for all his support of Time Banks over those many years. Just a year before the plane crash we had a big party for him in Maine; celebrating everything he had contributed. Money yes, but way more than money”.
It emerged only later, after his passing, that the solid financial backing he provided may have over-insulated the Time Banks and that more attention was perhaps needed to working out strategies for how Time Banks could become financially more self-sustaining relative to the attention paid to expanding the timebanking network and establishing new Time Banks. Only with the abrupt ending of the secure funding base has recognition emerged of the lack of developed sustainability strategies and the significance of this for Time Bank survival.
The death of Richard Rockefeller was sudden and unexpected. HEP and the other networked Time Banks lacked contingency plans and business models.
Since then the timebanking movement in Maine and New England has declined significantly. HEP used to be a flagship Time Bank in the US; however, lack of financial resources has caused the organization to struggle for survival and made it necessary to adapt in order to survive.
The generosity of Richard Rockefeller enabled HEP to implement an extensive network of Time Banks across the state of Maine and the region of New England, However the lack of developed and working business models has been a barrier and setback to sustaining operations following his unexpected passing.
Secure resourcing is still ‘missing’ in the case of most Time Banks today, as it is also for many other social innovation organizations. Although, timebanking has been practised in the US and elsewhere since the 1970s, most local time banks fail to achieve financial sustainability and do not survive long term. The few long-lived time banks are exceptions, but this makes these very interesting as ‘success cases’ from the perspective of exploring how they have succeeded when most others fail.
HEP used to be a pioneer institution in regards to experimenting and setting up new Time Banks. On losing its main source of core funding support it became very challenging for HEP to maintain its operation and to continue at previous levels of activity and intensity.
Auta Main’s comments about the work of Barbara Huston at Partners-in-Care sums up some of her learning from this case.
“In the time that I was there, I'm going to say probably in 2003/2004, we had put together a binder on how to start a time bank (TB) and we worked together with TBUSA on this. We had a video that went with it, a DVD. It got out some of these things: OK you need the kitchen cabinet, get the grassroots involved, plans and activities, reach out in the community…
…We also talked about the successes we had with reaching out for example to all the theaters in Portland and saying when you join the TB give us free tickets to shows and in exchange we can have members that will greet people when they come in and whatever else they needed. So we would share the different projects of the TB that have been successful. In Portland we had a Time Dollar taxi that we were able to buy with a grant we got that actually had a wheelchair lift, so we could take people to doctors’ appointments or to the beach or to the airport. TB members drove the taxi, taking others to a variety of things. That was active for 5 or 6 years. We got enough grant money to keep it up and to pay for the gas and things like that…
…But, again, the experience was that over time we hadn't made it sustainable, so the project would all end at some point…” …We were looking at Barbara’s’ model, because we loved what she was doing and thinking ‘could we do something like this?’ But we never ventured forward with any of that, with a social business kind of model, we didn't do that. We were trying to do the neighborhood thing and see if members/volunteers could actually keep it going. Okay, we have agencies that want to do it, let’s try that. We have got churches that want to do it. We were looking at all these different strategies for getting them started and keeping them going…
…And all along we always came back talking about what Barbara was doing, because very few across the US were really doing something nearly as successful… what they were doing was just amazing… and what they are still doing, what Barbara is doing… “ “The only reason I ever got out of timebanking is because I felt we were spinning our wheels…”
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