Community forge is a registered not-for-profit organisation in Geneva, Switzerland, which helps local communities adapt to the global systemic changes now underway.

Community Forge believes:
The developed world is unable to respond to the present challenges largely because the money system, designed to nurture the industrial revolution, necessitates economic growth and rewards short-term profit taking over long term asset management. We need to start valuing things which money doesn't value - from Indonesian swamps to unemployed labourers to the dignity of the poor - and we need a new money system for that.

Further, we believe that the scarcity of money, another design feature of the prevailing system which means, has a mass psychological impact and may account for many of the evils which some would write off as the insoluble 'human condition'.

Further, we reject the particlar globalisation doctrine which our politicians are driving us towards. It is increasing the gap between rich and poor and between politicians and the electorate. We call for increased localisation for psychological, environmental and economic reasons.

Further, as the planet gets more crowded and the resources increasingly scarce, we feel great urgency because every moment these problems are not resolved compounds the suffering of billions of our fellows, not to mention other species with whom we cannot identify.

We believe communities should be taking the initiative, organising themselves, providing their own services, managing their own economies, as well as energy, food & communications.

Board

Tim Anderson, manager; cyclist, dad, and new world entrepreneur
Matthew Slater, secretary; architect of the Complementary Currencies module for Drupal
Shawn Berlin, accountant; itinerant pizza oven engineer and business developer
Daniel Stein, social networker; social innovator, and new mediaphile

Associates

Value for People Complementay currency design consultancy & training
Daniel Walmsley Web systems management
Tim Inkpen CC activist for 10 years in Canada, IT professional

The statutes of the association are as follows.
Decision making organs:
The Primary decision making organ shall be the committee and anything affecting the statutes shall be decided by the General Assembly.
To change the aims or dissolve the association should require a 2/3 majority in the General Assembly.
All comittee members shall have the authority to commit the association to thrid parties.

Members
The cost of membership shall be 20 CHF per year
No member will be responsible for more than one year's membership fees in the case of the association being liquidated with debts.
If the association is dissolved with money spare, excess funds would be given to LETSlink UK

Community Forge is a not-for-profit association based in Geneva. It's team is distributed and usually located in Europe. It hopes to build a viable business model and remain independent, but is interested in talking to investors.

Mission
The mission of Community Forge is as follows
By offering economic tools, to enable real-world and virtual communities to declare their own localised currencies, and to trade in them using open source software, thus building a more sustainable economy for the 21st century.

Strategy
Starting with a LETS architecture coded into the Drupal platform, Community Forge is starting by providing as many LETS (Tauschring in German) communities with transaction-enabled social networking web sites. Where possible it seeks to train teams who can offer support at the national level.

Values
Consultants shall not be paid more than the Swiss National average for the given skill level
Difference between best and worst paid will not be more than a factor of 3
To practice what we preach i.e. using a local currency between ourselves

Aims

1. to enable communities to use mutual credit currencies as part of a larger localisation movement
2. to campaign and educate for interest free money
3. to concentrate expertise and foster experimentation in CC design