Our Story

What would it look like to trade without money? What would happen if we valued everyone’s time and skills equally, whether they’re a lawyer or a landscape gardener, an accountant or an app developer? These are the kind of questions we asked when we first started Echo.

Drawing on the methodology of time banking, Echo began as a project in Haggerston, East London, called Timber Wharf Time Bank – a local network where people could trade using time instead of money, and where everyone’s time was valued equally.

Starting small, we helped local people get their bikes fixed, practice languages, learn to bake. And pretty soon, businesses wanted in on the action – local theatres traded tickets for front of house support, yoga teachers traded classes for venue space.

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Beyond Hackney

With the support of Nesta and the London Legacy Development Corporation, we launched Hackney Shares, a trading network for businesses based on this same philosophy – trading in time and skills, not pounds and pence. And with several hundred members in the network – from tech startups and cafes to graphic designers and beekeepers, we decided to take the project beyond just Hackney, and launched as Echo.

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A growing online marketplace

We’re an online marketplace, but our passion is in fostering offline connections, strengthening relationships in and between communities; relationships that we know are key to community cohesion and resilience, enabling people to live more empowered, creative and connected lives.

We’re now a network of 5500+ members, ranging from local residents right up to large corporates, all trading with Echoes. We also support small businesses to flourish and grow via our business accelerator programme, Echo++, and help kickstart community-led social action projects via our civic incubator programme, the Community Chest.

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A model to unleash talent in every community

We’ve always had big dreams to see Echo grow and be a useful tool in many communities around the world. So in 2020, we joined forces with Civic – a social enterprise that helps develop and scale civic innovations within communities. Together, we are working on making our digital platform and Echo methodology shareable and replicable. We always love to hear from others who have ideas of how they could make Echo work in their communities. You can get in touch via hello@economyofhours.com