Creative support networks propose new events and meetings to provide tailored innovative solutions for complex local community challenges.

Digital community tools offer a wide range of easy-to-use tools, made accessible in order to help you make things happen: finding peers, structuring your community, organising meetings, launching campaigns, managing your projects, getting help to tackle a specific challenge, improving fundraising methods, measuring your social impact, etc.

This article addresses the challenges that people are encountering when deciding to adopt a complementary currency without fully articulating the problem or the context, and consequently many projects fail. Also it describes the work of Community Forge, a non-profit association that designs, develops and provides complementary currency systems and tools.

THE REPAIR CAFE CONCEPT IS SPREADING AROUND THE WORLD!

Repair Cafés are free meeting places and they're all about repairing things (together). In the place where a Repair Café is located, you’ll find tools and materials to help you make any repairs you need. On clothes, furniture, electrical appliances, bicycles, crockery, appliances, toys, et cetera.You will also find repair specialists such as electricians, seamstresses, carpenters and bicycle mechanics. Visitors bring their broken items from home. Together with the specialists they start making their repairs in the Repair Café.

Time banking is a p2p currency system where individual members exchange services on a voluntary basis with one another. Time banking values everyone’s time as equal. For every hour spent helping someone in your community, the contributor is entitled to an hour of help in return. The currency units are not money but hours of time spent by people on any type of labour (called a time dollar in the USA or a time credit in the UK).

Crowdfunding is a participative financing tool relying on social networks and communities (online) where people collectively fund a specific project.

Creative support networks propose new events and meetings to provide tailored innovative solutions for complex local community challenges.

Digital community tools offer a wide range of easy-to-use tools, made accessible in order to help you make things happen: finding peers, structuring your community, organising meetings, launching campaigns, managing your projects, getting help to tackle a specific challenge, improving fundraising methods, measuring your social impact, etc.

Self-managed spaces whereby people can come together to create, communicate and offer a more collective and alternative way of living.

When markets are shaken, as happened in Cyprus for example, traditional money can become scarce, leading people to search for other ways to pay bills or carry out everyday activities. Time banks, LETS or electronic currencies are all examples of the alternative ways in which people can live their daily lives more easily and more economically.

Online sharing communities are emerging all over the world to create links between people. The different platforms and groups offer alternative forms of consumption, where people are renting, lending and even sharing goods instead of buying them. It is not only material products that are being exchanged; people are also offering their knowledge, skills and time.

As people in Europe become more conscious about issues relating to waste, the environment, job security or financial insecurity, the DIY ("do it yourself") or GIY ("grow it yourself") movements have come to offer an alternative to modern consumer culture's emphasis on having to rely on others (industrial bodies, for instance) to satisfy needs.

Co-working spaces possess a huge potential to support environmental sustainability due to their inherently sharing-oriented constitution. At its foundations, co-working supports the sharing of space, supplies and other resources, thereby cutting down on basic wastefulness.

Awareness is the state or ability to perceive, to feel, or to be conscious of events, objects and other goings-on that might be affecting you, either directly or indirectly.

Active citizenship is about being involved in your community, having your say and taking part in decisions that affect you. Above all, it’s about people making things happen. This often means taking the opportunity to be actively involved in tackling the things that need to change around you. As a result you will be able to improve the quality of life in your local community as well as inspire others, locally or further afield, to take action and make change a reality.

Interactive workshops, in the context of creating awareness around certain topics (poverty, homosexuality, race), are extremely important for people of all ages, especially younger persons, since it helps to deepen understanding and knowledge as well as broaden people's minds by breaking down stereotypes and challenging issues considered "taboo" or "the norm".