REC (real economy currency) is a social currency created as a method for channelling public expenditure towards the local economy: 533 families that live in the Besòs area of Barcelona spend 25% of the MIS (Municipal Inclusion Support) payment using RECs in local, independently managed businesses.
As a result, the local multiplier effect of the public spending has increased by 54% within the first year, coproducing an additional public policy in supporting the local economy.
Mesensei is a community empowerment framework. It’s software engine is used by communities such as Tapiola High School (Finland), Dare to Learn Festival of Rethinking Learning (Finland), The Children and Youth Foundation Finland, Finnish Institute of Public Management, and University of Cambridge (UK) to build their own community platforms. A specifically interesting case is the Village of Giampilieri (Sicily, Italy), where Mesensei works with the villagers to create an app to bring the village out of isolation and save lives in the future. Primarily, the app helps the community to organise food festivals, but it also doubles as an early warning system about an imminent land slide and automates the mobilisation of evacuation volunteers.
Merits is a Milan (Italy) -originated platform created to facilitate the transition to a sustainable economy, by assisting and rewarding individual and collective behaviours that generate sustainable and shared prosperity. Society needs people and organisations to invest in little, daily acts of generosity, courage and care for people and nature.
Merits helps people to realise that they are not alone. It rewards their positive behaviour with digital tokens that, according to each specific project, can be used to buy qualified services or goods from small local business or to pay fees of public services or taxes.
Merits has already implemented and ended a first experimental project of the Municipality of Milan, Department of Social Policies, rewarding with merits tokens a number of refugees volunteering to clean and take care of the public green of a neighbourhood of Milan (the following case 1 explain it in detail).