Personal currencies may enable Resilient Places to spread skills through results-driven agreements, without recourse to taxation.

The approach involves mixing established ingredients – including alternative currencies – in new ways. The key elements are:

> (Re-)introduce the founding idea of European universities – whereby students themselves hire teachers – as a way to accelerate mastery of middle school, high school and more advanced skills;

> Identify a network of well-regarded offsite and onsite learning providers, including teachers, tutors, Internet-savvy homeschools, virtual charter schools, etc. that are willing to offer high quality courses; and

> Set up a system of personal currencies as outlined here (inspired Douglas Rushkoff’s keynote on Radical Abundance opportunities at the 2009 O’Reilly Conference). In essence, such currencies would be hour–denominated personal “gift certificates” of time, with the option to convert into tangible goods if the user so desired.

Student–issued time vouchers could specify the number of hours that the student committed to deliver indicated services (e.g. research, keyboarding, digital photo captioning, raking leaves, etc) they deemed to be of value.