by John Peters
2/14/10
Mount Airy's Downtown Business Association has an interesting program
going on. It's called the 3/50 Project, and it's a fairly
straightforward idea it asks area folks to select three local
businesses and spend $50 a month in those stores.
The premise is simple, if plenty of area residents take an active
role in the program, spending that $150 in local shops and
restaurants, they help keep those businesses afloat.
It's a great idea, if you ask me. I'm not going to give you some
cheerleader speech exhorting you to buy local and never purchase
online or in nearby communities. What you buy, where you purchase it,
and why you make those decisions are personal choices, with all sorts
of factors involved.
But the DBA program reminds me of another community just a little
north of here, Floyd, Va.
Floyd has an interesting history. Like many of the mountain
communities of western Virginia, its history is agrarian in nature.
That began to change in the early 1970s during the hippie and
back-to-nature movement. For some reason, many of those hippies
descended on Floyd, building their own little communes, some of which
are still in existence today.
Then, a little more than a decade ago as the world trembled at the
thought of all computer-driven functions grinding to a halt with the
arrival of the year 2000, Floyd became the Y2K East Coast refuge,
with people coming from points north and south, building
self-sufficient homes in communities that were off the electric grid.
And a few years ago, a group of Floyd residents and businesses got
together and actually minted their own currency, called Floyd Hours.
That's right, their own money, which is not only legal, but that
money is protected from counterfeiters by law just like U.S. currency is.
Unfortunately, the Floyd Hours economy didn't last too long. It got
off to a good start, with not only individuals using the local
currency for trades, but some area businesses accepting Floyd Hours
as partial payment for bills. The problem those businesses
encountered was that while they wanted to be supportive of the local
economy, they still had to deal mostly with suppliers from outside
the community, and those suppliers weren't really interested in
accepting Floyd Hours, which were worthless outside Floyd.
Once those local businesses reached a point where they could no
longer accept Floyd Hours, the currency quickly collapsed.
That was too bad, because I always liked the idea of a community
issuing its own local currency. In the end, that currency wasn't
about business or money. The hippies who settled in Floyd and started
those communes, the Y2K refugees who flocked to Floyd, even the
residents who started their own currency, were all really looking for
one thing community.
That, at its heart, is really what the 3/50 Project is all about
building and strengthening community. In an increasingly
interconnected world, where we can sit at a computer and chat
real-time with someone on the other side of the world, purchase
nearly anything including the kitchen sink online, and nearly live
without ever leaving the house, a sense of community is becoming
difficult to maintain, but more important than ever.
So, I won't necessarily tell you that you should take part in the
3/50 Project. But then again, it certainly would go a long way to
keeping, and strengthening, the community so many of us love.
--
John Peters is the editor of The Mount Airy News. He can be reached
at jpeters@mtairynews.com or 719-1931.
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