A new economy for a connected Taos
Here’s how we’re reweaving value, connection, and care in Taos.
Our mission
Taos TimeBank seeks to be a welcoming and vibrant platform encouraging time exchanges among Taos County residents: mutual exchanges of skills and services that improve the quality of individual lives, deepen relational trust, increase positive intercultural interactions across the lines that can divide us, and boost volunteer projects that foster community-wide health and well-being of the whole watershed.
Values: words to guide us as we grow
Why a time bank for Taos?
By launching Taos TImeBank, we’re aiming to address a few key social problems:
Problem #1: Today’s social climate is rife with political partisanship, cultural divisiveness, and economic insecurity.
For many people, these perceptions and realities are accompanied by high levels of powerlessness, individual isolation, anxiety and despair. Locally and nationally, we are experiencing a crisis of confidence, a breakdown of the common good, and a lack of coherent community. The common spaces that encourage interdependent neighborliness across different cultures are mostly gone. The social bridges that foster healthy intergenerational support between youth and elders are largely absent. We need opportunities for people to connect in trusting and beneficial ways.
Problem #2: Many, many people are left out, undervalued, and underserved within today's corporate economy in modern America, and the economy in Taos is no exception.
In particular, these sectors of our population are often under-valued and neglected in our modern economy:
- Parents raising children at home
- Teens with talents and time but little opportunity for creative employment
- Elderly with untapped skills
- Immigrants needing to live under the radar
- People involved in agricultural and seasonal work
- Poor and underhoused folks in need of support
In an economy that values corporations far more than community, those who don't fit into the system as full-time employees end up being undervalued, under-resourced, and under-utilized. They are tossed to the margins, which then leads to feeling undignified, unrecognized, and unnecessary as community members.
We need opportunities for people to be valued, resourced, and utilized.
Taos TimeBank is a direct antidote to these two problems.
It will be a complementary economy that dignifies relationships—a network that enriches, includes, uplifts, creates, and connects. Taos needs a community-based economic engine to bring people together—and incentivize them to keep coming together—in common trust and common benefit — across races, across cultures, across age differences, across neighborhoods, across class differences. Taos TimeBank is just that.
Daniel “Ryno” Herrera & The Watershed Way
The Taos TImeBank is dedicated to Daniel “Ryno” Herrera. We were a rather unusual pair, he and I, but over seven years he not only became my most valuable multicultural guide and incredible community development collaborator, he became my best friend. We did everything together: played together, prayed together, envisioned together, and worked side by side for the health of this incredible watershed and all the beings who call it home. Over the years we cultivated a social-spiritual place-based way of being we came to call the Watershed Way; our motto is “do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.” His spirit lives on in the Taos TimeBank, and the annual covenant we wrote together for the Watershed Way forms the foundation and inspiration for what the Taos TimeBank is about:
"We all want a better way to live together, don’t we? Yet too often we remain shackled to destructive habits and systems. Too often we remain distrustful of those we call strangers.
I’m done with wanting to be destructive and distrustful. How about you? Do you want to be a community that comes together—conjuntos as una gente, una familia, as a new kind of community, as a new kind of County-- a community that cares of all our children, takes care of our air and water and food together, and provides enough support so that all of our community members might live and thrive?"
"Will we trust each other? I tell you today I am going to trust, even though it seems crazy. I tell you today I am going to commit to this way of life, this movement we call the Watershed Way. I am going to build bridges across the lines that divide our County, our culture, our races, our religions. I will do so by my sweat and my labor, by my willingness to trust others, and my willingness to trust that our Creator will take care of us and this beautiful planet that we are blessed to share.
Will you join me? We of the Watershed Way are hard workers. We are going to get to work building the community that we want our children and grandchildren to grow up in. We will work for and delight in the kind of community that our Creator wants us to have, a community in which we all have enough: healthy local food on all our plates, good water for all to drink, renewable energy for all to use, a safe roof over all of our heads, jobs with dignity, confidence in our hearts, trust in our handshakes, and peace in the land." --our annual vow, spoken by Daniel "Ryno" Herrera
Ryno would be proud of the Taos TimeBank–it feels like the fruit of the seeds we planted together, the manifestation of the dreams we dreamed together: Taos County, conjuntos. WIll you join us? Will you cross cultural divides and risk trusting your neighbor to make Taos a better place? Like Ryno often did, I hope you respond by lighting up with a grin and saying, “Hey, why not? I’ve done worse things with worse people.” Lets do this!
–Todd Wynward, founder of TiLT and the Taos TimeBank
Land Acknowledgement
Despite our histories or habits, those of us who moved here can choose to set aside the mindset of the colonizer. If we do, we are welcome here. One part of this humbling process is to recognize that all of us who relocated here are guests, whether we’ve been here for five months or five centuries. As we settlers seek to settle well and join in the life of this precious and ancient place and the many beings who have lived here before us, we are welcome, but there are some steps to respect.
At TiLT, we have been taught a straightforward process from friends at Tewa Women United, native allies just south of us here in Taos. First, we should always acknowledge the peoples who lived here first. We need to name and authentically apologize for any ancestral damage, trauma, colonization, exploitation, and cultural destruction that might have been done by our forebears. Second, we need to pledge to live in resource-sharing, earth-honoring, Pueblo-dignifying ways.
For many of us in the Watershed Way, this seemingly simple process of truth and reconciliation has become a process of transformation, opening doors of healing in our hearts and making healing changes through our hands, our calendars and our pocketbooks. Our friend Mirian Naranjo of HOPE [Honoring Our Pueblo Existence] gave us a tool to keep this identity of “welcome guest” in mind. She is of Tewa territory, south of us, and we have modified it to include the Tiwa region around Taos as well. Based on her suggestion, we offer it as a blessing to start any legislative session, community meeting, civic initiative, or gathering of intention:
Everyone here is walking, living and breathing within these sacred lands of Tewa and Tiwa Peoples. Let us acknowledge where we stand and give thanks for the living mountains, valleys and waters, which sustain our lives and form Tewa and Tiwa ancestral homelands. Let us ground our activities in the awareness of where we are, and may the mannerism of Pueblo Peoples enter our lives and fill us with gratitude, love, care and respect for all that is shared between us and all beings.
