Social Justice currency being considered in San Francisco

I just met with Heather Young, a San Francisco activist, who is organizing a local currency project. She’s quite a wonderful woman, and is interested in making money have less (what she considers) negative externalities associated with the current dollar economy. She doesn’t say it that way. Who, but an economist, would throw around terms like this?

She wants a currency that promotes social connections, and isn’t controlled by selfish private or large government bureaucratic interests (both of which she believes to have conflicting interests with nurturing community based society). To achieve this, while being sensitive to all the participants values in the forming group, she believes a local cash economy, directed by a civic non-profit, will serve this purpose. Locally produced non-profit money exchanged between the hands of neighbors will promote social connections, and will keep control closer to the people who create the currency.

http://bayareacommunityexchange.ning.com/ , her organization, is this fairly radical and incredibly well intentioned group. I’ll be attending their next currency planning meeting, where they’ll be discussing various cc examples, their underlying values (hopefully coming to consensus on this), and determine next steps. Like many SF radicals, they are coalition builders and are quite interested in networking with other projects. Currency projects included.
Quite an opposite extreme from SDRs!