10 Hudson Valley Currents paper currency

Money for Nothing: A New Currency is Revolutionizing the Hudson Valley

By Paul Willis | January 6, 2025

A couple of months ago my wife, Edie, was given a unique opportunity. She was asked by a new friend if she wanted to be part of a program in which she would be given 250 in cash each month for the next half year to spend however she liked. At the time, it sounded too good to be true. There had to be a catch, I thought. There was, but it was not the kind you might imagine. The only requirement was to spend the money locally on goods and services that form part of the Hudson Valley economy.

Hudson Valley Currents paper currency 20 bucks

Ensuring this requirement was the reality of the money itself. You see, it wouldn’t be 250 US dollars rolling into her account every month, but Hudson Valley Currents. This alternative local currency can only be spent or earned by individuals and businesses within the Hudson Valley. Edie said yes, and a few weeks later, I went with her to the first meeting of the so-called “pollinator” program at Tilda’s Kitchen and Market, a community cafe in Kingston and the heartbeat of the Current movement.

Besides my wife, there were nine other “pollinators” present, an array of people from all walks of life, including entrepreneurs, Uber drivers, event organizers and creatives, who had the good fortune of being selected to receive the Currents – which are about equivalent in value to US$ dollars – for the next half year.

One important criterion governed the selection of pollinators: they all needed to provide a service that could be purchased with Currents. This is a crucial aspect of the architecture surrounding this alternative currency. It’s a set-up known as a mutual credit system, in which the supply of money is determined not by an external bank – how most currency systems operate – but by the requirements of the economy itself.

Everyone who participates in the Current ecosystem is indebted to and in credit to everyone else within the system. So, if you buy things with Currents, you also need a way of earning them back since there’s no centralized banking institution to lend them to you once you run out.

Hudson Valley Currents guaranteed income initiative

The Current’s founders, Chris Hewitt and David McCarthy, use the phrase “It’s just money” when referring to their creation. What this phrase points to, says McCarthy, is how inherently unjust the current monetary system is, which is set up in ways that allow large and powerful banks to dominate and control who has access to money and under what terms.
“In the United States, we have a tremendous injustice around credit,” says McCarthy, who also originated the idea of the pollinator program. “And people are outraged by it. They’re outraged by the fact that the rents have doubled in the Hudson Valley and that most people don’t have a shot of buying a house.”

However, the perils of the global monetary system go further than concerns about justice and equity. As the author and professor of sustainability Jem Bendell explains in an illuminating Ted Talk, there are strong reasons to believe that the global monetary system itself is fueling the chaos and ecocide that we are currently living through. As Bendell points out, our current system of money creation, which sees private banks conjuring money out of thin air and loaning it to people at interest, has become so out of control that there is now more debt in the world than money.

The consequence of this is a continuing cycle of expansion and over-consumption. As Bendell explains: “Because we need more lending to catch up because of all the interest, we must have more and more products and services traded and therefore, we must have more consumption of natural resources. Otherwise, the system will collapse.”

Explained this way, it’s easy to see how the global monetary system has become a serpent consuming its tail. By contrast, not-for-profit currencies like the Current have none of the exploitative dynamics of our debt-based system. Instead, they return money to its original purpose – to assign value to goods and services so they can be exchanged. “Just money,” in other words.

But also “just” in the sense of equity and fairness, a recognition that at the heart of all monetary exchange is an energy exchange and if this energetic exchange becomes about the trading of skills, gifts, intentions and the reciprocity of interpersonal relationships, then it’s not just goods and services we are trading, it’s the values that underpin those same things.

Hudson Valley Currents paper currency multiplier effect

Since it was incorporated as a nonprofit in 2014, more than 1.3 million Currents have been exchanged, with an average monthly circulation of around 20,000. Membership of the Current stands at around 400, with those members running the gamut from brick-and-mortar stores to individual creatives to everything in between.

The pollinator program, meanwhile, serves the purpose of ensuring liquidity in the system, “priming the pump,” as McCarthy puts it. “From our data from previous cohorts, [the program] is successful in greatly increasing the use of the Current, and it’s beneficial to people. So it’s a win-win situation.”

At the first welcome dinner, pollinators were introduced to the physical currency, which is artfully designed with illustrations of local wildlife. They were versed in using the Current app, which allows the currency to be exchanged via smartphones. Most of all, they were encouraged to spend their monthly allowance.

5 Hudson Valley Currents paper currency

Leaving the meeting, Edie and I felt a little giddy with the decadence of it all. A beneficent organization gave us free money and encouraged us to spend, spend, spend!

I set about divesting myself of our Currents the very next day at Postmark Books in Rosendale. Even though I’d seen a sticker in the storefront advertising their acceptance of the currency, I couldn’t quite believe the reality of the thing until the transaction was complete, and I was walking out of the store, book in hand. In the coming days, we found other places to spend our allowance, buying bulk food items at FØLK Refillery & Supply in Kingston and groceries at Tilda’s, the community cafe and grocery that Hewitt set up in 2020, which remains the most significant trading point for Currents (as of last year more than 6% of Tilda’s gross income came from the currency).

Browsing the members section of the Current website and seeing the broad range of participating businesses was impressive. There were sauna designers and reiki masters, larger-size enterprises like the popcorn brand BjornQorn, web designers and plumbers. There was even a sweet-looking guy called Matthew promising “philosophical discussion” in exchange for the currency.

Also included in the directory was Hudson Valley Thai Massage, a massage business run by Rosendale-based Diana Seiler. She’s been a member of the Current for the last nine years. “I joined about a half year after it was launched,” says Seiler. “Why? Because I value and am inspired by ways of living life outside of the normal structures and systems that have become status quo.”

She adds: “I like being a part of an economy that connects people and local businesses as a means for supporting each other, and one that showcases local options for meeting one’s needs and interests over box stores or online shopping.”

One Hudson Valley Current bill

This hyper-local facet of the Current is a key part of its raison d’être, says Michael Marks, an adjunct professor at the University of Albany’s School of Social Welfare, who has studied alternative currencies for the last 15 years. “What happens in most localities, but especially in poor communities, is that the money leaves,” says Marks, who has co-authored several papers about the Current. Big box stores, coffee franchises and fast food multinationals might have a footprint in communities. Still, their vast profits often find their way into the pockets of shareholders and investors elsewhere. Alternative currencies are designed to stop this so-called “money leakage,” says Marks.

“By building a local currency, you can only spend in a geographic area or within some other agreed upon governance structure; you bring more money locally to circulate,” Marks says this process has many positive repercussions, including generating more wealth and income locally. McCarthy also explains that there is an ecological benefit to reducing the geographical size of supply chains. “If you shorten supply chains and shorten commuting, you also create better community connections,” says McCarthy.

A growing number of communities worldwide are waking up to the advantages of local currencies. While there is no definitive figure for the number of these currencies in existence, the Complementary Currency Resource Center listed about 300 in its database back in 2016. Many of the most established local currencies are in Europe, such as the Time Dollar, a tax-exempt currency created in the UK in the early 1980s to assist disenfranchised communities. Closer to home, Ithaca, New York, launched in 1991 its local currency – the Ithaca Hour – which was accepted by more than 500 local businesses at its height. Meanwhile, the Berkshires town of Great Barrington has been experimenting with local currencies for about the same time, with the most recent iteration, BerkShares, up and running since 2006.

Yet despite this proliferation, it’s hard to overcome an attitude pervasive among many people that still values convenience and low cost over the greater good, says McCarthy. It’s an attitude that he labels “bourgeois materialism,” which he admits has been “a deep obstacle to adopting a local currency.”

Against this backdrop, the Current has nonetheless stayed the course, surviving the uncertainty of the pandemic and the economic recession that followed. “We’ve persevered, and in a small way, we’ve been successful,” says McCarthy. “I don’t claim that we are vastly successful. But I claim that we are raising consciousness and, at a small scale, benefiting people.”

Since all money is a necessary fiction, the question in the end becomes: what kind of story do we want to tell ourselves about the money we use? So far in history, it has largely been a story of exploitation and domination. But through initiatives like the Current, it’s possible to see that a new story is possible, one where we come to understand that true wealth has nothing to do with the figures in a bank balance and everything to do with the human connections we make every day in the communities where we live.

As they note on their website, the Current is about “illuminating the abundance that’s all around us… We believe that we have everything we need right here in the Hudson Valley.”