During our Solarpunk Roadtrip across Europe, we stopped by Panicale, a beautiful small medieval town in the heart of Umbria, Perugia, Italy.

The town has about 5,600 inhabitants, but only about 600 live in the old town (intra muros). As we were walking down the streets (you can pretty much go through all of them in an hour), we stumbled upon a celebration happening in the local church. You could feel the strong community feel of the town. A third of the village must have been there. It was beautiful to see.

In one of those streets, a house was for sale. I don’t remember all the details but it was something along the lines of €300k, half price for something twice the size of what you could buy in Brussels (which is itself, quite cheap compared to Paris or London).

The thought that I could buy it and turn it into an AirBnB and make good money with it puzzled me. What on earth gives me permission to just impose myself on that community? Just because I have euros?

Imagine being part of that local community and having to accept a new person whose interest is not aligned with the wellbeing of your community?

This situation is happening every day in our neighborhoods. As a result, we have lost the sense of community. No long term relationship between neighbors. It’s all transactional. Why should we spend time building relationship if tomorrow someone else could live next door that only cares about their own personal interests?

This is enabled by our economic model based on a single currency. It doesn’t matter how you earned it, be it by teaching at a local school, or by abusing human or natural resources. What matters is that you have that currency. If you do, you are free to impose yourself in any neighborhood and do whatever you feel like.

This is not a bug, it’s a feature. It’s about making sure that if you’ve contributed to grow the GDP, all the doors should be opened to you. Your money should give you access to everything.

What if it wouldn’t?

One way to change that game is to introduce another currency that stays in the hands of the local community. This currency could be earned by showing up at regular community meetings and contributing to the community in various different ways. It would be a way to reclaim what has value in the eyes of the local community.

This wouldn’t replace the euro. It’s not “or”, it’s “and”. Like in a video or board game where you need, and coins 🪙, and wood 🪵, and stones 🪨.

Of course people would still be able to exchange their coins for the local currency (like you can exchange wood for stones in a game), but this would mean that someone local, someone that is actively contributing to the local community, was ok with giving some of it to you.

That’s why we have introduced our own community currency at the Commons Hub Brussels. If you want to become a coworker and share that place with us, you have to pay not only with euros but also with Commons Hub Tokens (CHT). Those tokens cannot be bought, they have to be earned. You earn them by attending our community meetings and by contributing to maintaining our common space. It's proof that you are involved in the community, that you care, that you contribute.

Since we launched it in June 2024, we have issued a total of 2,921 CHT to 105 different accounts (https://txinfo.xyz/celo/token/cht). It’s an ongoing experiment but it has already been helping us better value and acknowledge all the various contributions to the community. It’s those contributions that give life to a community.

That’s why my goal now with Open Collective is to make it easy for any community to also issue their own currency. I believe it’s a missing piece of the puzzle to rebuild strong resilient communities.