Assessing Our Impact
A short film about the birth of the Taos TimeBank premiered last month to a crowded house!
The short movie created by UNM-Taos’ Digital & Media Arts Department documents the emergence of our initiative, and highlights a statement I made about our vision: by launching the TimeBank, we’re aiming for “nothing less than social transformation.”
I want to reflect with you about that statement. How, through the Taos TimeBank, are we engaging in social transformation? As we enter a new year together, it feels like a good time to take stock of our impact so far. Recently, Krista Woolhiser took the time to assess the impact of the Taos TimeBank since we launched mid-August 2025. Here are some numbers:
In our first four months of operation, with only a light layer of paid coordination, the TimeBank mobilized and directed a significant volume of unpaid community labor toward the enrichment of Taos County. 614 hours of community labor was mobilized in these first four months, meaning an average of 153 hours per month or approximately 38 hours per week. This labor was distributed across anchor organizations, individual care, and educational skill-sharing. Ten different Anchor Organizations received valuable unpaid support to achieve their goals—everything from constructing a children’s garden and joining a widespread watershed cleanup to harvesting corn, making adobe bricks for a housebuild, preparing healthy local meals for schoolchildren, and assembling grain bins for a local mill.
These are baby steps, to be sure, but in my mind this is how the path toward local social transformation begins: neighbors helping neighbors for the betterment of the community. Gandhi’s vision of interdependent community resiliency and self-sufficiency begins by realizing that our community contains many untapped resources, and through weaving a robust regional relationship economy we can meet many of our needs.
What do I mean by weaving a robust regional relational economy? It’s what we started to weave this Fall. Let’s look at the numbers again: if we value those 614 hours at $25/hour, the Taos TimeBank mobilized a pool of robust, regional, relational labor worth $15,350 in the cash economy. This is a humble but promising beginning, demonstrating our initial impact, and showing how together we can continue to impact and enrich our community. This winter, let’s continue to quietly walk a path of social transformation, moving at the speed of trust toward the kind of community we want to see in the world.