Goal: Using a lived example, the workshop shows how a food community can use money and its own unit side by side – and asks how such communities can connect across Europe.
From 2012 to 2018, people in Basel organised themselves as the Lebensmittel Gemeinschaft Basel (LGB), an association working as a food coop, usually with around a hundred and at its peak about 160 members. The city provided a low-cost room with storage, kitchen and pick-up. Member fees paid the rent and the base costs of a CSA farm the community helped to build.
Once a week was pick-up day. Until a fixed deadline, members ordered in a shared tool. Then the quantities were bundled: storable food came from stock, fresh food was ordered from farms within 60 to 100 kilometres. On pick-up day everyone weighed their own amounts, added items from the shelf and confirmed in the tool.
What made it special was the accounting. Every member had a prepaid account in Swiss francs that paid the external costs, above all the full farm price. The margin for room and organising – the community worked with 20 percent – could be paid in its own unit, the LGB. LGB went to those who carried the community: organising pick-ups, sourcing from farms, tidying the store. Whoever made something, such as bread from the community’s flour, could offer it through the tool and earn francs and LGB.
The LGB had clear criteria for its products: at least Bio Suisse standards, seasonal and regional, no air freight, direct contact with producers. For products like olive oil from Greece, however, intermediaries were needed – and wholesalers would not share the information the community needed according to its values. That is where TEIKEI came from: it built on the LGB and took on this responsibility itself.
The workshop starts with a question that reaches beyond the LGB: do we give to take – or do we give to give? Between regions, countries, tribes and continents there can still be a clearing system that keeps things in balance. Within a community, the gift can apply: the community cares for each person’s wellbeing and respects their drive to express and realise themselves. Behind this is an outlook: everyone has the right to food of this quality.
↑ One level up: Workshop: Two currencies, one community
Compiled by the TEIKEI editorial team with support from AI (Claude)
Created on 24 October 2026 · Last updated on 24 October 2026
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