Marcelo Mario Caldano

Marcelo Caldano has designed an alternative economic plan for poverty-stricken areas where economic participation is not always an option. The community-based participation program helps citizens effectively use local resources to meet a growing need for public services and institutions.

Marcelo's plan relies on a new kind of currency to build and sustain schools, public institutions, and citizen sector organizations. Rather than paying cash to support their school, participating members contribute work hours–which are calibrated to an average wage–and work together to deliver services. In turn, classrooms get swept, electrical wiring gets installed, school lunches get prepared and served, administrative and clerical tasks are completed, curricula get written–and most importantly, children get an education. Private businesses also pay into the system through donations of equipment and services that families can then buy.

The economic crisis in Argentina has meant that cash is scarce and many institutions–like schools–lack funds to serve urgent public needs. Marcelo's idea not only provides the needed resources, but also initiates an important mindset shift: value is ascribed to the nonfinancial contributions of each member. The results are dramatic. In one community where 80 percent of the population is too poor to participate in the formal economic system, Marcelo's system has resulted in a self-sustaining school that serves one-third more students. The community is busy supporting the school and developing plans for other services as well. Having demonstrated the success of his approach, Marcelo is working to introduce the model in communities throughout the country and apply the concept to other areas of social need.

The economic crisis in Argentina has devastated the country. The census estimates that 18 million people–half the population–live below the poverty line. Meanwhile, one-quarter of the country's workers are unemployed. As many as three million Argentines use the Barter Club System because money scarcity has forced them into the practice of exchanging goods and services informally. In today's economic climate, citizen efforts are needed more than ever to solve the country's pressing problems.

Yet the high demand for services and solutions to address pressing social problems means that existing organizations are unable to stretch themselves any further, and indeed, the quality of services has declined considerably as a result. In this environment, creativity in designing local solutions and a change in mindset is desperately needed: from one group helping another, to both groups working actively together to design a solution.

At the end of 1997, a group of 40 families decided to organize themselves as an educational cooperative in order to give their children a better education than the one they were receiving in the public school. One of the first obstacles they faced was that many families could not fully afford the monthly fee needed to support the school. Without proper funding, the cooperative's budget would not cover many tasks that would insure proper functioning of the school–administrative and financial management, building maintenance, gardening, making didactic material, or coordinating small businesses. During the first year, organizers covered up this shortage of cash with the members' voluntary work, but soon it was clear a more structured framework was required to insure greater equity.

To meet this need, Marcelo designed a compensation system called the Community Hours Bank. In this system, the value of the working hour is fixed at an average hourly wage for nonprofessional services. He has instituted a currency as well–the unit of which, the cossetones, can buy products and services that the cooperative or other families offer, or pay part of a participating family's commitment to the institution. The bank issues cossetones when a family signs a monthly "in-kind check," or commitment to deliver a product or service to the cooperative–piano lessons, handmade clothes–roughly equivalent to $15. The cooperative also secures in-kind donations from private companies, including the use of computers, access to a library, or special classes. Families that do not participate in the school can purchase a membership by contributing roughly $5 per month, paid for in-kind.

Marcelo is president of the cooperative, which comprises 60 associated families. Teachers are associates of the cooperative and receive a salary similar to salaries in public schools. The cooperative has an annual budget of $35,000; 30 percent of its financing comes from the Community Hours Bank, 40 percent from the association fee that is paid in cash, and the remaining 30 percent from developing funds including small productive initiatives (honey production, for example), cash and in-kind donations obtained from strategic partnerships with companies and foundations like Unilever, Procter & Gamble, BAGÓ Laboratories, Provencred, and the Minetti Foundation.

Marcelo has already led the Community Bank system beyond the Cooperativa Olga Cosettini´s boundaries. Local authorities of Capilla del Monte see a use for such services as Public Schools Cooperative, Fire Brigade, Hospital's Cooperative, and Local Unions. They want to institute the model at a municipal level, and Marcelo is training and coaching them in this endeavor. The General Administration includes representatives of public, business, and social organizations.

Marcelo's work has attracted broad media attention and many other communities have requested his services. The Public Schools Inspector for Córdoba Fifth Region wants to set up the bank system in 434 public schools and the IDEAS Foundation, which works in the educational field in different regions of the country, has asked Marcelo to train its institutions to adopt the model as well. The Community Hours Bank won the World Bank's Small Donations Program, and with CIPPEC's (an NGO devoted to changing public policies) patronage and SES Foundation (Alberto Croce, Ashoka Fellow), Marcelo has held a national meeting of cooperative schools and social economy. Two hundred educators and public education representatives discussed the model and provincial authorities in education and social economy attended the meeting as well. Marcelo has also introduced the Community Hours Bank in the curricula of the Social Economy Organizations Graduate Program in the Tres de Febrero National University.

To meet the escalating demand, Marcelo is currently strengthening his team and refining his model to offer uniformly promising results still adaptable to local needs. He wants to clearly lay out the model and examples in a handbook to allow practitioners to apply the plan to areas besides schools. Marcelo's project is being mentored by Fundación Compromiso (Carolina Biquard, Ashoka Fellow), AVINA consultants, the CIPPEC Foundation, and Integra Consulting.

As a young man, Marcelo was inspired by Gandhi's call for a formal system that depended not on massive-scale production but on production by the masses. For years, Marcelo lived with communal groups in Argentina, France, and Spain–experiences that instilled in him a strong commitment to truth, nonviolence, and consensus. They are the values that underlie the decision-making process in his work today. In 1988 he moved to San Marcos Sierra, a small town in Córdoba, and began to realize that genuine social change can be achieved only through education. After traveling through the United States and learning about American "Intentional Communities," groups of people who live in rural areas with specific aims–monastic, ecological, educational–he returned to Argentina and settled down with his wife and their twin sons.

He began to urge a group of local families about the need to create an educational alternative for their children. He researched and tried different educational styles–from kindergartens where the teachers lived with their pupils to established methodologies, including Waldorf and Montessori. In 1997 he met Velia Blanco, an educator who followed the Argentine educator Olga Cossettini's innovative work in the area of artistic education. Though the parents and teachers Marcelo assembled immediately agreed with the pedagogic idea, establishing a longer-term process was difficult, especially as the group lacked money to run the school. Nevertheless, Marcelo managed to organize his community and launched the project in 1998.