A Community Inclusion Currency (CIC) is a community-issued mutual credit token backed by member commitments to accept it in trade for goods and services within a defined community. Issuance rests on the community’s own labor and productive capacity. Circulation is bounded by the community’s geography or membership. In current implementations the CIC runs alongside national fiat and complements it in transactions where fiat is scarce.
Origin
The pattern was developed by Will Ruddick through Grassroots Economics, beginning with Bangla-Pesa in Mombasa in 2013 and extended through the Sarafu Network across Kenyan and East African communities. The design draws on the tradition of Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs) and the complementary currency lineage that includes the Chiemgauer, the WIR Franc, and the Bristol Pound. Recent Sarafu deployments use blockchain infrastructure for the mutual credit ledger.
Structural features
Issuance is decentralized. Each member or member group extends credit by pledging future acceptance of the token against their own goods, services, or labor. The pledge is the backing. No central issuer holds reserves against the currency, because the currency’s convertibility is into the goods and services of the community itself.
Circulation is bounded by the willingness of the community to accept the token. A CIC that circulates only among ten households remains valid within those ten households. Growth in circulation follows growth in the accepting community.
The currency has no external peg. Its purchasing power inside the community is determined by what community members offer in exchange for it. This gives the CIC its structural protective illiquidity. External actors cannot use it because they have not pledged to accept it.
Role in the corpus
The CIC forms the ground tier of the three-tier architecture that realizes sensor-response money. At this tier the observing signal is primarily social: labor commitments, mutual credit balances, participation records, and the record of pledges kept. The bioregional currency proper, held at the boundary by a Bioregional Financing Facility, sits above the CIC layer and is backed by measured biophysical performance. A bancor-style clearing union sits above both, arbitrating trade between bioregions.
CICs are the pattern by which the community-observer role in sensor-response money first becomes operational. The mutual-credit ledger of a CIC is already a record of who commits what, kept by whom, honored when. That record is one of the raw materials from which a bioregional currency’s community-generated data stream is composed.
Related entries
Will Ruddick · sensor-response-money · bioregional-financing-facility · bancor · commitment-pooling · protective-illiquidity · mycelial-patronage · transvestment · bioregional-economics