Welcome to LOVE: the Lake Oswego Value Exchange, our Mutual Credit & Time Bank. Explore this LOVE:Home website to learn how our community is developing a Mutual Credit system to support our community and sustain our local economy. To learn more about Mutual Credit and Time Banking, please click the FAQ link at the top right.
Happy 100th Birthday, LO!
We honor our past and place in history, celebrate the present and imagine our future.
Through participation in LOVE, we support our City’s Sustainability Plan as described in
10 Steps We Can Take especially
Think Local First, including these important Steps:
- Patronize locally-owned business and buy locally-made products.
Keep in mind that buying local keeps more of your money in the community.
- Meet your neighbors.
- Volunteer to help elderly neighbors with projects.
- Help create a sense of place in your neighborhood.
- Set up / participate in a “skills bank” on your block or neighborhood / network.
If you have already registered for your LOVE:Bank Account, you may Log-in Now.
Otherwise, if your home, business or organization is located in Lake Oswego, Oregon, you may register now by filling-in the online New Friend Registration Form.
LOVE is a Mutual Credit and Time Bank that provides Friends in our community with LOVE:Bank Accounts and Advertising Space on the LOVE:Bank website (link at the top right corner of this page). The Advertising Space provides you with a local, searchable marketplace to post your offers and wants (skills, time, work, goods & services). Your LOVE:Bank Account gives you the means to exchange your offers and wants with Friends – without the need to spend your scarce money. All transactions are made using Mutual Credit currency.
Mutual Credit is complementary currency, which is based on an agreement within our community to accept a local currency as a means of payment. Mutual Credit is complementary because its intent is not to replace national currency but rather to help us strengthen our core economy: our home, family, neighborhood and community that have been so damaged by the global financial meltdown.
This idea has a rich national and global history from the Great Depression on to our current predicament. Smart people have (re)invented community currencies during times of high need and un(der)employment when the national currency was failing to meet their needs.
If you have been looking for opportunities to trade your skills or turn your surplus goods into value, open a LOVE:Bank Account. If your organization wishes to motivate volunteers or your business would benefit by monetizing excess capacity,
talk to us about how the LOVE:Bank can help meet your goals.
Strengthen our community’s social capital – the quality and quantity of our relationships – by building friendship, good will and trust throughout our community.
Production from local resources, for local needs,
is the most rational way of economic life.
E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
Imagine Craigslist or eBay transactions without the need for scarce dollars. At the LOVE:Bank, your community credit serves as the medium of exchange and your earned reputation determines your ongoing credit worthiness. Credit is given where credit is due, by you unto others and others to you.
Treat others as you would want to be treated.
LOVE Operating System Principle: The Golden Rule
