Hong Kong has a vibrant community of Time Bank micro-economies that help communities band together on a platform of mutual-support to self-organize as a means to mitigate negative impacts from poverty, unemployment, crisis, marginalization, or other hardships suffered at the fringe of society.  How time banking works is through the exchange of one’s time-and-services for another’s time-and-services, documented on a ledger to track who is owed what by whom, but through the equivalency of time instead of a cash-price.  It has been adopted by many Hong Kong community centers, nonprofits, and NGOs to address various local socio-economic issues, including aging, gender-inequality, and community resilience, and has been growing for over the past two decades currently serving over a dozen districts with nearly 20,000 community members​. 

 

Currently, time bank practices in Hong Kong have intrinsic limitations from serving the entirety of Hong Kong in that they are: 

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• analog transactions  – documentation of transactions are  still registered on a paper ledger 

• centralized marketplace – transactions must be registered locally at community centers

• fragmented micro-economies – each community center has their own timebank currency which is not fungible with other community centers