Thomas Greco on Building Healthy Community Economies | Local Currencies Conference (2004)

The Schumacher Center for a New Economics is dedicated to creating a just, regenerative economy, promoting tools to foster more regional economic production and trade as well as community stewardship of land and other shared assets.

During the weekend of June 25-27, 2004, the Schumacher Center convened a conference “Local Currencies in the Twenty-First Century: Understanding Money, Building Local Economies, Renewing Community.” Over 300 people gathered at Bard College in New York State to join what participant Pete Seeger called, “the best conference I ever attended.”

In today’s global economy, national currencies have effected a centralization of wealth ownership and a widening of the gap between rich and poor – the while undermining local communities, devastating indigenous peoples, and polluting the environment. Decentralized regional currencies represent a counterforce. A local currency defines a regional trading area, favoring independent businesses and resilient, regional marketplaces. They promise to aid a redistribution of wealth more broadly while supporting unique regional identities, cultures, and communities, rather than faceless global corporations and domineering nation-states.

Thomas Greco is a community economist based in the USA, an author who writes and consults on monetary exchange alternatives, including private credit clearing systems, complementary currencies and local currencies.