Innovation: Fureai Kippu (ticket for a caring relationship)

Japan

AAI Domains:

• Independent, healthy and secure living (improving access to health and care services, care giving to older adults)

• Participation in society (voluntary activity)

Fureai Kippu (ticket for a caring relationship) is a time banking system for people of all ages that is primarily aimed at providing social care support for older people. It was pioneered in Osaka in 1973 with the establishment of the Volunteer Labour Bank which aimed to mobilise women at home to provide social support to older people on a voluntary basis and operated a small scale with ‘branches’ of 10 to 20 members in a community forming a network of volunteers. Volunteers received time credits for providing social care and support services to older people in their neighbourhood, which could be banked for future use or transferred to another ‘branch’ so that care and support could be provided to an elderly relative in another locality.

As Japanese society aged very rapidly during the last three decades of the twentieth century there was increasing interest in this form of mutual and participatory form of social provision that fitted well with the Japanese style of welfare state. In the mid-1990s the Japanese politician Tsutomu Hotta coined the phrase Fureai Kippu to describe this form of time banking for social care and there was an expansion of provision under the general co-ordination of the Sawayaka Foundation across Japan. This period of expansion lead to a variety of systems developing including time credits being supplemented by modest cash payments paid by older service users as acknowledgement for their service as a ‘paid volunteer.’

The introduction of the Long Term Care Insurance Act in 2000 actually undermined the operation of Fureai Kippu, just when it was emerging onto the policy agenda of European think tanks and social policy analysts, by providing eligible older people with additional resources to purchase care services and leading to paid volunteers withdrawing from the time banking system to be paid more for providing similar services under the new legislation. Fureai Kippu continues to operate approximately 400 branches across Japan with a mixture of local groups, local government supported branches and two non-profit organisations (Magokoro Care Services and Nippon Active Life Club) administering the time banking system.

Time credits with cash payments – either to the organisation for administration or from the user to the paid volunteer – is the more common form of operation for the approximately 70,000 people who are active participants in the system. Fureai Kippu has continued to attract interest from around the world but faces severe challenges in Japan as the number of service users rapidly increases but the number of volunteers stagnates.

In relation to active ageing domains, Fureai Kippu provides opportunities for voluntary activity across the age spectrum (including older people), improves access to health and care services for older people in need of social support in order to live independently and enhances social connectedness. Fureai Kippu has much to commend it as a social innovation to meet the social care and support needs of older people it is not a panacea and is probably best viewed as a means of supplementing an adequate system of provision organised by the state.

International Journal of Community Currency Research article