Bronwen Christianos

WAE (Whaingaroa Appropriate Economy) began germinating in 2009 after a meeting at the Old School on Thursday 8 October.

An advertisement in the local Chronicle drew interested persons to meet and listen to Bryan Innes and Peter Luiten present their thinking on practical working community economies, ideas which sidestepped the drain of interest on borrowed finance:

That evening was followed by a series of meetings at John Lawson's house in Cliff St.  John's house was very central and John was happy to provide the venue.

The group settled into a core number of people who met and discussed the How of trying to set up a workable system.

We talked back and forth issues like security for "loans", which we gradually realised was not the appropriate word to be using, so this became Funds Utilisation (FUs).  Likewise our first name was Whaingaroa Interest Free Finance, and as we developed our thinking we realised this name was not a correct representation of our purpose, so the name was changed to Whaingaroa Appropriate Economy.

For me these early discussions were really interesting and energizing, as I came to realise how indoctrinated I was with understanding economy in terms of ’the way things are’.  It was exciting to open up the possibilities of ‘the way things could be’.

The horrifying estimated statistics of how much money was actually disappearing out of the Raglan economy in the form of interest payments ($12m a year) was a great incentive to see if we could find some realistic workable alternatives.

One of the outstanding features of this early group was that it was an example of genuine collaboration.  The core group contained people with radically different lifestyles. The only common factor was that we all had Raglan connections. Our group thinking genuinely developed though our discussions.

In January 2010 we set up a group bank account with Kiwibank with 5 signatories. We all started putting in a regular amount of money.  One of the members got the ball really rolling by putting in a reasonable sum, which meant we could start figuring out how it was going to work by doing it.   This meant more meetings and figuring out the format of this funds utilization.  The first person to apply for and get an FU on 5 June 2010 knocked out her credit card debt.

One principle which emerged from our discussions was that ultimately our default had to be trust. To build a healthy community-based ethical appropriate economy we had to be able to trust the people we were connected with.  This made the group particularly interesting because we were meeting on no other common ground than a mutual interest in trying to find answers to the huge issue of economy, in agreement that an impersonal interest-based economy was a hugely flawed system that was ultimately unsustainable.

After a period of keeping the core group limited to those who had begun the journey together, we decided to expand by opening the group up to interested parties.  After a couple of meetings our numbers were increased in August 2011 to 11 members (partners counting as 1).  In many respects the growth has been slow, but this has probably helped develop confidence in the process.  To date we have saved close to $1,000 not paid to banks in interest.  Although this is a small amount compared with $12m, it is a start!