South East Essex LETS

LETS is sometimes regarded as alternative �green� money, or sophisticated barter. We believe that this approach to LETS is misleading and entirely misses the point. LETS does nor have to remain in the realm of material exchanges, It can, and in many areas does, evolve into a way of rebuilding links within communities, empowering people ordinarily disempowered by our narrow money system. rather than just being a multi-functional �Local Energy Transfer Scheme�.
When thinking about the subtler functions of a LETSystem, it is useful to compare LETS with money. Money is most obviously disempowering to those who lack sufficient quantities of it to lead healthy, wholesome lives. But it can also disempower people who have piles of it because of the way it is acquired and the distance it creates between people who share a community.

Mono-Money
Money can be multi functional to those who have it, but in the pursuit of acquiring filthy lucre we can become increasingly mono-functional. These days it is common for people to work weekends and evenings, as well, often keeping the treadmill turning either by an addictive desire for ever increasing amounts of money, or by a more simple need to survive.
Money also acts as a �barge pole� device because it distances people from each other - the more affluent we become, the more we tend only to associate with rich people as �social equals� and the more isolated we tend to become. Just look at places like Holly Lodge Estate in Highgate, London or Hollywood in California and see the high security fences, cameras and alarms which are regarded as necessities. In a divided society, money creates materially comfortable prisons and emotionally isolated people.
Money also creates secrecy (i.e. Swiss Bank accounts); elitism; plutocracy; and control of land - disempowering those who lack it, socially, psychologically and physically. But it isn�t money that is intrinsically bad, it is our fearful tendency to hoard it that empowers it rather than ourselves and others.
In a just and sustainable community, money could be used to benefit everyone. But the community itself would need to be working towards sustainability - socially, ecologically and spiritually - before the insecurity, which stems from our very unsustainable lives and feeds the �love� of money, could be overcome by its members.

Liberating LETS
Fortunately, in our unsustainable world, we have LETS. By refreshing and liberating contrast Local Energy Transfer Schemes enable us to become empowered, freer from fear and multi-functional. No longer are we limited by being �just� a computer operator or unemployed person. We can be baby-sitter, seamstress, gardener, organic vegetable grower, artist, coppicer, house painter, poet, mechanic, and the realisation of otherwise unobtainable ambitions.
LETS isn�t secret. A system provides information about those that use it - their skills and hobbies, their phone number - and therefore about the resources available in the community. LETS builds bridges, creates links, aids networking and opens the heart of the community by bringing people together rather than isolating them. It enables individuals and communities to implement positive designs: permaculture plots, vegetable box schemes, wholefood co-operatives, building schemes, tree planting, community health care etc.. It also engenders good health by encouraging quality of life and well-being and allows access to low or no cost preventive and natural forms of medicine, organic food, even house swaps and holiday homes.
In a LETSystem every individual is hopefully revered and able to participate, regardless of qualifications, politics or wealth. There are potentially no �haves� and �have nots�. Neither does it exclude women, children, men at home with children, the unemployed, the �un�proffesionals or the less mobile. Nor are the �chronologically advantaged� excluded; experience, which is so often ignored and devalued in society, can become a great asset - imagine having LETS apprentice schemes in which older people can pass on skills to younger people.
There is no such thing as an unskilled person. We simply live in a conceptually limited society which educates some of its members to think that they lack skills - and LETS can free us of this limiting misconception.
So LETS isn�t a one dimensional green money system or a sterling alternative - still deeply limiting concepts- LETS is empowering, truly democratic and an important tool in the building of sustainable communities.