Positive Impact With Community Currencies
AROUND THE CORNER: A single decision for a better climate
We know by now that human activity is the main driver of global warming. To keep life on earth bearable we should stay below 2°C warming. If we don’t, the climate becomes more extreme and droughts and floods more likely. It probably seems as if you cannot make a big impact, but knowing your piece of the cake can help. When you want to do your part you should invest about €250 per year up to 2020 which adds up to €1.250 per person. Next to these investments you should aim to reduce overall emissions by 30% within the same time frame. Reduction cannot be achieved with a single topic (e.g. energy, food, household goods etc.). Therefore it should become a habit to keep your footprint small with everything you do. Golden rules are: to prefer experiences over goods, and in case you need goods; try to borrow, reuse or buy second-handed, eat less meat, put money on a environmentally conscious bank, use public transport and stay nearby for holidays.
To make an impact within this topic Myron Koster designed a holiday booking platform during his Master graduation at Qoin. This platform aims to make people book their holiday on a location nearby home. It makes a significant impact because the trip is almost half of the total holiday emissions. In the platform, called Around the Corner, a currency is used to reward bookers that stay nearby. The closer users stay to their home, the more voucher value they receive after making a booking. These so called Locals can be used to pay other users, book a new holiday, handed over to a friend or used for products and services at the accommodation.
Here’s how it works: accommodations automatically give a discount of 20% and instead of taking it off the price, the money ends up with the consumer. Even though Locals have a euro value they cannot be exchanged back for money by consumers. The closer users stay nearby home the more Locals they receive. Accommodations can earn back a large part of the discount by selling products or services to their visitors paid for by Locals. The part of the discount which is not handed over to their guests (mainly to those from further away) is given to the accommodation as a separate CO2 compensation budget. This budget can only be used to invest in means to compensate for travel emissions (e.g.: renewable energy, waste/resource reduction or plants and trees). Around the Corner can make money with an annual membership fee of 10 Locals, transaction fees (5%) and a margin on the webshop sales.
With the currency, emissions become part of the buying decision, the holiday footprint is reduced, investments in renewable energy are triggered and users make a big difference with a single decision; going on holiday nearby (for more details you can read the thesis). The interviewed accommodations indicated strong willingness to give the system a try because they found the idea engaging and the transaction system could be a great time saver. Families were also very positive, it was surprising to see how quickly children understood the concept’s working and could imagine using it. The current prototype is a viable starting point and could work in real life.
It would be great to make it a reality one day!
About the author
Myron Koster has been awarded with a scholarship from the JAK Bank in Sweden with his work "Positive Impact with Community Currencies". His research has been in cooperation with the agency Qoin in Amsterdam. He studied Strategic product Design at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Ever since Myron was young he wants to be an inventor. His view on what this means has changed over time but the process of creation is still his greatest passion. After graduation Myron started his own innovation agency called intrinnovate. With Intrinnovate Myron aims to help organisations create an innovation process which results in purposeful and profitable products time after time.
