About The Toronto Dollar

A Toronto Dollar Spent

Initiative is 10 per cent earned towards local charity
By Andrew Horan

Alternative currencies can be found all over the world. They are meant to encourage local spending. Since 1998 Torontohas had its own alternative currency, the Toronto Dollar. What sets it apart from others is the charity aspect, 10 per cent from every dollar goes to charity.

Merchants have a choice of spending their Toronto Dollars or cashing them in. If they choose to cash them into Canadian dollars 10 per cent goes back into the community.

TD executive director John Cook said that several UScities such as St. Louis, Missouriand Travers City, Michiganare looking at adopting similar models.

“They’ve looked at our business model and they feel it’s superior and they like the way we’ve allocated the funding to the various charities within our own auspices,” Cook said. “They’re really impressed with that.”

Since the program began approximately $400,000 in Toronto Dollars have gone into circulation and $40,000 has gone to the charities and community groups that Toronto Dollars supports. Margaret Atwood, David Suzuki and David Crombie are among the big name supporters of the program.

Toronto Dollars are currently accepted by 160 vendors in the St. Lawrence Market and a variety of shops, services, and restaurants along Front St. Cloverdale Mall and Gerrard Squarehave recently come on board. There are currently two Toronto Dollar ATMs in the St. Lawrence Market with plans for more. The ATMs were set up with the assistance of the Polish Credit Union.

Program co-founder and manager of Timbuktuon Front St., Susan Bellan would like to see the program eventually go citywide. This was her original plan but she decided on a pilot project in the St. Lawrence neighbourhood. An investigation into taking the dollars across the city is to be completed soon.

The program is moving into seven business improvement areas (BIAs) in the coming months; also Riverdale and Yorkdale and other satellite neighbourhoods of the St. Lawrence area will offer and accept the dollars.

The City of Toronto accepting tax revenues and payments in Toronto Dollars has also been suggested.

“I’ve done a kind of modeling where if four per cent of Torontonians would exchange $100 Toronto Dollars a month then we could raise $15 million annually for community projects and charities in the city,” Bellan said.

A $90,000 grant from the Trillium Foundation allowed the program to hire an executive director for two years and set-up the two ATMs. It’s hoped that the program will be able to maintain itself eventually. Prior to this the dollars were only on Saturdays in the St. Lawrence Market. Bellan said that getting volunteers to work the booth could sometimes be a hassle.

“It’s building on what other communities have done around the world. They’re learning from the same set that other communities have found in terms of doing this and it reinvests,” said Pat Else, director of grant operations for the Trillium Foundation. “It really is a great concept. It’s very innovative. They’re having great success. The more enthusiastic people can be about it the better for those communities.”

Toronto Dollars will be involved with attempts to bring business back to the city after the recent SARS outbreak. Some of the BIAs they are setting up in areas affected by the outbreak. A dinner club has been proposed that would encourage people to eat at a Chinese restaurant and pay for the meal in Toronto Dollars.

The ambition is for Toronto Dollars to be the first viable local currency in the world. Some of the plans being suggested include a $7 bill, a Toronto Loonie and encouraging tourists to use Toronto Dollars.

“We’re always known as the city that works but quite frankly we’re not the city that works anymore,” Bellan said. “This is a way of showing that in the face of globalization, where everybody’s being forced to downsize, downscale and there’s all this pressure, a city can say we’ve got all these resources here and let’s use them.”

Photograph by Andrew Horan