Healthy Money Healthy Planet - library.uniteddiversity.coop

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because of the variety of incentives involved. To help the volunteer organisations with
the new technology, they were given free IT support and computers as part of their grant
funding. A person’s volunteer hours or Community Service Dollars were entered into the
computers of these non­profit organisations and this information was then fed into a
database at CHC Data.
Christian Isquierdo, who evaluated the scheme for Hennepin County, said: ‘They
tried to cross boundaries they didn’t fully understand. The divide between doing social
good and promoting local businesses is a tenuous dance of costs and benefits. They never
could figure out how to make the whole system work for everyone with less cost. They
tried to drive the project on massive transaction fees without including any reciprocal
responsibility.’
Joel Hodroff agrees that the system’s failure is partly due to the fact that we are still
in the early days of dual currency debit cards, and reminds us that early versions of
credit cards in the 1960s ended up with acrimonious debate and hundreds of millions of
dollars of bad debt. He suggests that besides better transaction technology, it is critical to
gain the partnership of mainstream companies in the banking and transaction industries
if similar programmes are to have any hope of success. 21
, formerly Commonweal Hero
,
– formerly Commonweal, Inc. started in 1993 –
As at November