The Fifth Annual BALLE Conference was held on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, San Francisco. Attended by over 700 people, the conference presented a wide range of speakers on a wide range of subjects related to social enterprise, social entrepreneurship and emerging social and economic technologies to advance the goals of creating strong and self-reliant local living economies.
The Social Money Workshop of the WSSE was in attendance, with everyone from the Facilitation Committee (FC) except for Dr. Gill Seyfang attending. The Facilitation Committee is comprised of Annette Riggs, Chris Lindstrom, Tim Jenkin, John Rogers, Yasuyuki “Miguel” Hirota, Stephen DeMeulenaere and Gill Seyfang. Most of the FC was kindly provided accomodation by Sergio Lub from the large Friendly Favors Network (www.friendlyfavors.org).
The evening before the conference started, everyone involved and interested in complementary currency systems met at Cafe de La Paz in Berkeley for dinner and getting to know each other better. Heloisa Primavera delivered the keynote speech for the evening, where she mapped out recent developments in South America and her vision for radicalizing democracy. At the same time in other parts of Berkeley, the BALLE Film Festival was being held, presenting films relevant to BALLE participants.
The pre-conference full-day Seminar, “Money for Local Living Economies” was organized by Annette Riggs and Susan Perrin from Current Innovations (www.currentinnovations.org) and attended by over 70 people.
Following the welcome from Annette and the Introduction to the seminar by Thomas Greco, the first panel was on Hours and Time-Based Systems, moderated by Sergio Lub and featuring presentations from Mark McDonough from TimeDollars USA and John Rogers from Germany, recently the executive director of the Wales Institute for Community Currencies (www.wicc.org.uk, www.valueforpeople.co.uk), who both talked about their work with these systems in America and Wales. The Seminar was also treated to a special appearance by Edgar Cahn, the founder of Time Dollars.
