Flores do Barlavento was set up in the summer of 2020 by a group of locals from the South West of Portugal who were looking for a practical way to exchange services and goods with other locals in a simple and sustainable way. We see it as a way to get our practical needs met while connecting and empowering our community at the same time.
How to Florish
Joining our community is easy. It only takes a few minutes to sign up and you can immediately start interacting by offering your skills and goods. Once registered, you decide what is the value of your offerings and upload a description and/or image of your offering.
How to value your offering
The basic exchange principle is that one hour values 10 FLORes. However, working with expensive tools or highly educated labour can be valued more. If you are not sure what to offer or how to value it you can check out other peoples offerings for inspiration.
How to cover costs
It is also possible to add euros to the calculation for products or services that involve cost made in euros. For example: when offering a chocolate cake or a taxi ride you can add ingredients or petrol in €. It’s always a matter of prior mutual agreement between the two who make an exchange.
How does this relate to money
We prefer not to make comparisons to the money. Flores are units of exchange and are simply numbers (with no value outside of our system), registered on the CES platform where every user has their own personal account.
How to stay balanced
When I receive services or goods from a member of the community my account is debited (-) for the agreed amount of Flores. Vice versa I am credited (+) when I am on the giving side of the exchange.
To assure a certain balance, we are restricted to maximum +400 and -400 Flores. This way you will be reminded to also receive when you have mainly been giving and vice versa. You don’t need to wait for someone to buy or use a service from you to start interacting, you can also begin with receiving.
How to support the Flores Core group
At the creation of your account you are debited 20 Flores that will be used to retribute the dedicated team behind the Flores do Barlavento. This way we prevent the typical member fall-out non profit organisations tend to experience.
In the summer of 2020 a devastating fire surged over kilometres of land in the south west of Portugal. In a matter of hours the landscape turned into a graveyard of dead trees and smouldering black earth. Many of our community members lost everything they had. You can imagine the loss and bewilderment they experienced watching years of land and building sustainable lives went up in smoke…
However, one of the amazing things that came from this fire is a beautiful and very organic development of community. It was truly inspiring to see how quickly neighbours (near and far) came together to help. So small groups were formed to help clean the land, replant vegetation and share ideas on how to make the land more resilient against possible future fires.
Soon the need arose to organise this exchange in the more structured and efficient way. Also there were many people that were not affected by the fire who wanted to help out and we wanted to find a way for them too to receive something back one day. This is when the idea developed to create an exchange system to organise all this generosity. We started looking around at existing systems and found the CES platform where we registered our very own Flor. Today we find many people gravitating towards this idea and more and more goods are being exchanged rather than just helping hands.
There are many benefits to working with Flores. One of the most important aspects for us is connection. Although technology has connected us in some amazing ways, we are also starting to realise that there are other connections that we seem to have lost. Somehow it has become quite normal for us to not really know our neighbors anymore or where our food comes from. We don’t know anymore who planted that crop, nor do most of us know much about the people who build our house or come to fix our plumbing.
One of the other great things of the Flores is how it changes our relationship to the things and services we use and how it puts us in touch with near or further neighbours. Even if it is only a brief interaction of picking up a bag of oranges someone picked from their tree, you still get a sense of who they are and where those oranges came from. We found that in reality many new friendships and collaborations sprout from the otherwise simple interaction of finding your food or fixing your car.
