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“It worked perfectly,” says Fournier, whose new scheme offers Tenino residents who demonstrate they are experiencing economic difficulties caused by the pandemic a stipend of up to $300 a month in wooden dollars. 

Since the launch in May, cities from Arizona to Montana and California have been in contact with Tenino for advice about starting their own local currencies. “We have no idea what is going to happen next in 2020,” adds Fournier. “But cities like ours need to come up with niche ways to be sustainable without relying on the larger world.”

Such so-called complementary currencies — a broad term for a galaxy of local alternatives to national currencies — have been around for centuries; according to research published in the journal Papers in Political Economy in 2018, 3,500 to 4,500 such systems have been recorded in more than 50 countries across the world. Typically they are localized currency that can only be exchanged among people and businesses within a region, town, or even a single neighborhood. Many are membership programs limited to those who have signed up for the scheme; they typically work in conjunction with rather than replace the official national currency.

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