Taking care of ourselves, other people and our world

We’ve invited James Togut from The Good Life For All to guest blog for us as the winner of the best idea for the “Help People Help Each Other” Challenge in our Competition (if you were thinking the competition is over, think again, we’ve now launched the second half which is for designers and developers to put forward prototypes).

The Sunshine Bank is all about recognition, so we’re delighted to be have been recognised in the ‘Help People Help Each Other’ category. We very much look forward to working with Kent Connects and GeoVation and to taking part in the Developing Solutions Camp on 25th November.

On the Sunshine bank, we raise money for local charities by saying ‘thanks’ to our friends and telling them ‘well done!’. This is how it works. Members earn virtual tokens of recognition by posting the actions they take to look after themselves, other people and our world.

These tokens are called ‘Lumins’. They gift their Lumins to their friends to recognise them for their actions. With their gift, they also acknowledge their friend for a quality they see in them and vote to decide how money that has been donated by local businesses gets allocated to local charities.

We launched the Sunshine Bank in October 2011 with a focus on Brighton & Hove, where we are based. So far, we’ve raised £1,000 from local businesses, which will they will over to 5 local charities working with young people at a ceremony in December. The next fundraising round will run from December until the end of January and will support charities working with older people.

We are testing our model and if successful, aim to scale it to other towns and cities in the UK. We have applied to NESTA’s Innovation in Giving Fund, you can watch our video presentation.

Let me introduce you to our team: James Togut is Founder of the Sunshine Bank, John Barton is the Co-Creator and runs Pilotbean. Ian Shaw is the Senior Developer and Eko UK, Dave Woods is the CSS/HTLM developer and Van Cameron the web designer. We look forward to meeting and working with you to bring the Sunshine Bank to Kent.

I had the idea for the Sunshine Bank last May as I was staring out of a train window. I was thinking about the things we do for each other without expecting any money in return. It’s taken me a while to capture in one sentence what the sunshine bank does – “creating the kind of wealth that money can’t buy”.

Over to you!

Do you want to design or develop a prototype on how people can help each other. Check out our competition and here and sign up to our event!