Mission & Activities
What we do:
Zumbara is a platform where groups and individuals can pool and trade experiences and skills, using time instead of money as the unit of currency. To give an example, Mary shows how to make his own web page to David for 2 hours, earns 2 hour in return, spends 1 hour on having her washing machine fixed and the other hour by having her wedding playlist organized by someone else.
Time banking is being practiced in 35 countries to strengthen local communities. The main innovation Zumbara brings is the combination of this system with a social network: Time Bank. Thanks to the technology that Zumbara has created, Zumbara became the time bank that is growing fastest.
In Zumbara.com, the categories with the most services exchanged are education, language, music, technology & internet and sport.
Zumbara.com is a technological tool for Zumbara in which offline and online, both do have importance. Zumbara has many offline gatherings such as gift circles, barter days, open bazaars, weekly yoga classes, open stage etc. in İstanbul, İzmir, Ankara, Eskişehir, Denizli, Adana and Antalya so far. All these gathering are held by community facilitators who are volunteers of Zumbara.
Our vision: We believe that such a world is possible where people let the time free, use money as gratitude, live in a gift culture with the consciousness of unity, integrity and abundance.
We contribute to this world in this way:
Raising awareness about sharing culture and gift economy, opening spaces for people so that they can meet their needs by sharing their gifts ( knowledge, skills, experiences, time) and generating trust based relationships and cooperating communities
At this stage, we are a group of motivated friends but we are working on the formal process of becoming an association. we hope to have accomplish everything by the end of 2015
Main figures & Metrics
| # registred users | # services | # services exchanged | Annual Budget (TL) | |
| 2012 | 14.552 | 7.743 | 2.063 | None |
| 2013 | 26.836 | 15.931 | 4.901 | None |
| 2014 | 33.653 | 21.174 | 6.479 | None |
| 2015 YTD | 38.233 | 23.224 | 6.861 |
Source of funds
Zumbara team has tried many different models in order to create a financial sustainability model.
Zumbara had a relationship with an angel investor for 1,5 years which ended up as we could not agree on the same values and the vision. It was a great experience for Zumbara. Moreover Zumbara team has accomplished one of the biggest budget crowd funding campaign in Turkey in order to support Zumbara's programming costs.
These days community continue to support Zumbara through Garage sales and these kind of donation events. We are in the process of becoming an NGO through which we will have more opportunity to apply for funding projects.
