YOUNGSTOWN

For the citizens of Youngstown Ohio, September 19th is the anniversary of Black Monday, the day in 1977 when 5,000 steel workers went to work at Youngstown Sheet and Tube, only to learn they were being laid off immediately. Over the next year, some 50,000 steelworkers lost their jobs in eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania, the first in a wave of job losses and foreclosures, deindustrialization, offshoring and “free trade” across the country. Mass layoffs became commonplace throughout the former heartland of American manufacturing, from Missouri in the southwest to New York in the northeast, a region that became known as the “rust belt.”

In the intervening years, the rust belt has metastasized into other regions of the country as manufacturing declined amid a race to low-wage offshore production, making Youngstown patient zero of an economic pandemic. More than 40 years later, the effects are still being felt in Youngstown and beyond.

It is fitting then that like the mythical Phoenix, that Youngstown be the birthplace of an economic revival that will likely lift the whole rest of the United States. The “how” has been revealed by Youngstown-based Sustainable Communities Corporation (SCC). SCC has developed a breakthrough economic development program that can eliminate poverty, food insecurity and most of the other 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations.

SCC calls its program the Sustainable Communities Framework (SCF). A non-profit economic think tank, SCC discovered times and places in history when local economies were extraordinarily prosperous (see these examples), in some cases more so than most places in the world today. Research into the “why” of those successes yielded a unique economic development formula.

At the heart of those successful models was the fact that local communities issued their own local currencies (in contrast to national currencies like the dollar and euro). The SCF program is based on the premise that “we the people” can issue our own money (called complementary currencies) to fund economic development.

Those historical examples all occurred well before the modern digital age, but SCC identified the success factors and built a complete new digital economic development ecosystem around those core principles. “The system gives people the tools to take charge of their own prosperity and grow their own economies, without begging and competing with each other for scarce government support or waiting for others to provide them the resources needed to solve major problems.”

The SCF program being launched locally includes a digital complementary currency bank that will issue a local currency for Ohio called the BuckOH. There is also an online marketplace that resembles Craigslist and eBay, where users can buy and sell goods and services using their state complementary currency.

Each state will have their dedicated marketplace which in turn is divided into local regions. The site for Ohio is here and purchases can be made using the BuckOH. The marketplace can be used by businesses in the formal economy as well as individuals in the informal economy (like Craigslist, garage sales, etc.). 

To get a quick feel for how our whole ecosystem comes together, we have prepare a Guided Tour that walks you through the different components and how you can participate.