Re-thinking our Monetary System: Bay Bucks and the New Economy

Our monetary system is the operating system of our economy. Right now, it is impoverishing the majority of our population, and killing our ecosystem. It is past time for a re-think. 

In this teleseminar, the co-founders of Bay Bucks and organizers of Living the New Economy Convergence--Oakland will discuss how they are building a different kind of money for the Bay Area, and how it can serve as a new operating system for a new economy.

Speaker bios:

Kendra has a background in Biology and Health Sciences. After completing her Master's in Parasitology, she worked in STD & HIV prevention and Public Health research for several years. During this time, she became increasingly concerned for the future of our communities in the face of environmental degradation and a faltering economy. Transition SF led her to attend a December 2011 workshop with author Charles Eisenstein (Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Community in an Age of Transition), which inspired her to quit working in Public Health in order to begin researching local and complementary currencies.  She discovered that many of the needs of the community, including access to health services, could be most readily and sustainably addressed through a flourishing local currency.

Chong Kee Tan has been an activist for 20 years, working in the area of Asian democracy, press freedom, censorship, and -- after coming to the United States -- in the area of equal rights and sustainability. After the 2008 financial crisis, he began studying our financial and monetary systems, and quickly came to realize that these systems are the root causes of the most pressing problems facing the world today. He started Bay Bucks as a TransitionSF project in hopes of reversing the rising trends of inequality and making the SF Bay Area more resilient. Chong Kee received his BA (Hons) in Computer Science from Cambridge University and his PhD in Chinese Literature from Stanford University.