STRO’s CEO, Henk van Arkel, is currently in Uruguay. Read here his post on the meeting between an Uruguayan and Costa Rican cooperative that both want to implement one of STRO’s monetary tools:

Yesterday we organised a meeting for our visitors from the Costa Rican cooperative Coopevictoria and a Uruguayan cooperative. When the cooperatives discovered that they both were working on implementing a C3 immediately the atmosphere became one of comradeship. Both shared the opinion that the cooperative movement should work towards a new type of money.
The present monetary system concentrates wealth, taking it away from the majority of the people. In the last twenty years the money that accumulated with the 1% richest people was invested in funds that use the money for speculation instead of investing it in the real economy. That destroyed the balance between purchasing power and production, because there was too little money available in the real economy to buy products. Therefore, the prices of industrial products decrease and economies get into recession.
At this meeting the cooperativistas decided to raise attention for the need of another money system into the cooperative community. The first step is making C3-showcases inside their cooperatives. Because when people experience that alternatives for the present money are possible they will be more ready to join the movement for alternative money.

Previous blogs by Henk van Arkel:
Research on mobile money
Training for start of C3-Uruguay
Training C3 for cooperative from Costa Rica