Agenda to be discussed in March 2021

Miguel di you want members from Southeast Asia? That is my home ground ....

Lin Chew

Definitely!! For now we have participants from Indonesia and the Philippines (perhaps from other countries too, but I don't know where each of you are from). It would be especially important to have contacts with non-English-speaking countries (namely Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam)...

Who are your members from Indonesia...my organisation has been doing some work with women's grouos there....

Here you see Benito Lopulalan, who is the most active guy as far as I know in Indonesia in terms off SSE, but it doesn't mean other Indonesians aren't welcome...

Ah yes, I know Benito...he is with ASEC Indonesia.... I have joined Framavox, on Helen Hill's invitation, but I havent introduced myself...
I have also invited my dire ct colleague, from tbe Institute for Women's Empowerment in Jakarta, to join.... she said she had?
I will think about who else to invite.... from Thailand, MAlaysia...

Lin

Yeah, it would be great to invite people from other Southeast Asian countries. Those from other parts of the world don't know about this region's characteristics, but the linguistic diversity makes it hard for us to reach the grass-root activists and it's fundamental for us to have people from different countries so they can engage on their respective country. Here is the panorama (correct me if I write something wrong):

• Brunei: the official language is Malay, while English is also widely spoken. It's the richest country in the region thanks to the oil, and I don't know if we can find any SSE practices there.

• Cambodia: the local language is Khmer while only few people are fluent in English.

• Indonesia: while hundreds of languages exist, the national language Indonesian is spoken and understood all over the country, and it's also understood in Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore and Timor-Leste.

• Laos: the national language is Lao, quite similar to Thai, and many people, especially in the capital Viantiane, understand and speak Thai, while neithe English nor French is widely spoken.

• Malaysia: the national language is Malay, mother language for ethinic Malays and second/third language for non-ethnic-Malay Malaysians (mainly Chinese and Tamil) who have their own native languages (Mandarin, Cantonese, Tamil etc.). While English is widely spoken, some ethnic Malays aren't good at English, while Indonesian can be well understood because of the similarity with Malay.

• Myanmar: the official language is Burmese, remotely related to Chinese (but unintelligible, such as English and Hindi), and the use of English is far from widespread, despite being a former British colony.

• the Philippines: English is widely understood in the academy, business and public administration, although people speak Tagalog and/or other Filipino languages as first language and their proficiency in English varies from person to person.

• Singapore: nowadays most people are fluent in English as second language, regardless of their ethnic origin, while

• Thailand: the official language is Thai, similar to Lao

• Vietnam: the official language is Vietnamese. While its vocabulary has been headily influenced by Chinese, it's wrong to say Vietnamese is a dialect of Chinese, and nowadays it's written in Roman letters, with no siilar language to be used as official language in another country.

Some possible topics here are as follows, but you can suggest more:

1) How to reach uncovered and/or little-covered subregions: Africa, Oceania, South Asia, the Caribbean, Germanic Europe, Eastern Europe, former USSR and Middle-East

2) Review on the pamphlet on SSE: See here for details.

3) Description on the SSE scene in each country, highlighting the historic background, (ex.: In my country the concept of SSE was introduced as social enterprises, so they're still considered to be the most representative sector, although in the last few years we've been seeing the growth of fair trade and organic farming.)

4) Any help you want from the global network (ex.: Recently I heard local currencies are an interesting tool to promote local economy, but my country is devoid of experts. Do you know whom to contact in this field?)

Do we have any members from Argentina? I've heard they developed several local currencies when the economy crashed in 2001/2002 and there are ongoing crises...in 2018 another devaluation of currency. Are you in touch with Thomas Greco https://beyondmoney.net/about/ or Bernard Lietaer about local currencies? Or Rob Hopkins from Totnes who started a Transition movement? Also Paul Glover, who started the Ithaca Hours movement which was among the most successful in the US.

Bernard Lietaer died in Feb 2019, so we can't contact him any more, while Tome Greco is still fine. Paul Glover seems to have withdrawn from the movement. Below is what I can tell you about local currencies these days:

• In North America (US and Canada) some experiences can be still found, such as Calgary Dollars and Berkshares, but they aren't networked.

• Latin America has achieved the best network of local currencies, together with Spain and Portugal, and we're organising a virtual conference (in Spanish and Portuguese) from Fri, 9th to Sun, 11th April (contact me if you want to join this group, although it's necessary to understand Spanish / Portuguese). Regarding barter clubs in Argentina, most of them ceased to operate in 2003 and nowadays we find only a few practices.

• Europe has some national networks, such as Independent Money Alliance in the UK and Monnaies Locales Complémentaires Citoyennes in France, but it's far from being well networked continentally. I suppose it's important to build it up once again, with online meeting facilitated by Zoom, but so far we aren't sure how to do.

• Asia/Africa: Some initiatives can be found, but in general they aren't networked, except CES which was born in 2003 in Cape Town (South Africa) and Hong Kong Timebank Platform which was set up last year (see their first online conference, in Cantonese).

I hope you'll like this summary...

Thanks, Miguel. Sorry to hear about Bernard Lietaer. Paul Glover is in Philadelphia, last I heard mostly involved with community gardens in vacant lots. But he also ran for governor for the Green party in 2018. Sorry to hear that the Argentine barter movements were not successful long term. Madison Time bank in Wisconsin was very successful for a time, and Madison Hours also had a small following. Good to hear Berkshares is still operating. I’ve heard of informal barter networks among young people here in Arkansas. These may become more vital if/when faced with a financial disaster. I look forward to hearing about these other experiments you mention. I speak Spanish passably but probably not well enough to follow the conference you mention.