Learn About BerkShares
BerkShares are our local currency for the Berkshire region.
Pay with BerkShares as cash at participating businesses in the area, keeping money in local circulation.
Securely backed by U.S. Dollars on reserve with our community banks, BerkShares paper notes are exchangeable for U.S. Dollars at six branch offices of two regional banks, and are accepted at hundreds of locally owned participating businesses.
BerkShares may be obtained in exchange for U.S. Dollars at a one-to-one exchange rate, i.e., 10 dollars equals 10 BerkShares. They can then spent and accepted as cash at participating businesses. BerkShares can be traded back to U.S. Dollars at any time for a 1.5% exchange fee.
Choosing BerkShares is a conscious commitment to buying local.
Taking a personal interest in the health and well-being of our community, BerkShares lays a foundation for a vibrant, more sustainable economy. The currency distinguishes the local businesses that accept it, helping to knit community-minded businesses and inhabitants of the region closer together.
Paying in BerkShares also spares small sellers from high credit card processing fees.
BerkShares Local Inc. is the place-based, democratically structured non-profit that operates BerkShares.
Since 2006, it has worked in collaboration with participating community banks, area businesses, and local non-profits to strengthen the regional economy through the currency and related pursuits.
As a tool for community economic empowerment, BerkShares fosters greater economic self-reliance for the region in increasingly uncertain times.
PROGRAM ADMINISTRATOR
David Fix helps ensure that overall operations of the organization are running smoothly, facilitating the work of the BerkShares Local Inc. Board and that of the broader program team.
David has a background in non-profit administration and development dating back to 2019. He holds a B.A. in Economics from Bowdoin College.
PRESIDENT
Dennis Iodice is a business manager who works as the Director of Operations at Berkshire Mountain Bakery. He returned to the Berkshires after living in on the west coast, where he worked in the furniture industry.
Dennis also serves on the board of the Berkshire Food Co-op.
Vice president
Leah Barber had a long career as a dancer, choreographer and teacher. In addition to performing, she
was a Teaching Artist for Lincoln Center Institute, faculty member in dance and theater at Rutgers
University Mason Gross School for the Arts, and founded and ran her own 501(c)(3) nonprofit dance
company.
More recently, she has engaged in environmental activism, was a founding member of 350NYC and an organizer for the 500,000 strong 2014 People’s Climate March on the streets of New York City. She has lived in the Berkshires for forty years.
Director
SooJa Whalen, Area Manager South County has over 20 years of experience in the Southern Berkshires. Her banking career began with Legacy Banks and Berkshire Bank, which included roles as Teller Supervisor and Financial Services Representative. SooJa joined Lee Bank in December of 2016, while continuing community efforts including the Out of Darkness Suicide Walk and serving as Board Member of Southern Berkshire Chamber of Commerce.
SooJa was raised in the Berkshires and has resided in Great Barrington for the past 25 years. She has two grown children, and in her free time enjoys hiking, tennis, and cooking.
treAsurer
Susan Witt is the Executive Director of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics which she co-founded in 1980 with Bob Swann. She has led the development of the Center’s publication, library, seminar, and other educational programs. She incorporated the Community Land Trust in the Southern Berkshires in 1980 to create more affordable access to land for housing, farming, and small business development. In 2006 she co-founded BerkShares, and before that created and administered the SHARE micro-credit program, the precursor to BerkShares.
DIRECTOR
Allison Crane was raised in Dalton as part of the legendary Crane Family, well known for its history of civic engagement. Together with one of her brothers, she managed Excelsior Printing, which in 2006 printed the first edition of BerkShares, our region’s local currency.
Now living in Egremont, Allison runs her own business as a freelance stylist & an Accredited Staging Professional who transforms living spaces in Berkshire, Columbia & Litchfield counties.
DIRECTOR
Kyle Patzwahl is an Assistant District Attorney with the Columbia County, NY District Attorney’s Office. He was formerly an associate at Cain, Hibbard & Meyers PC. Originally from Hudson, New York, Kyle graduated from The George Washington University in 2017 with a B.A. in Political Science and a Minor in Business Administration. He earned his J.D. from Boston College Law School and MBA from Boston College Carroll School of Management in 2022. During his time at Boston College, Kyle served as President of the Real Estate Law Society, Committee chair of the Law Students Association and Board Member of Eagle to Eagle, a mentor program.
A resident of Lenox, MA, Kyle has a passion for skiing, gardening and spending time with his dog, Henry.
Director
Beatrice Smith has had a long career as a university professor and administrator in the US and abroad. She moved to the Berkshires after retiring from Michigan Technological University, and looks forward to engaging more in local economic affairs.
Besides travel, she enjoys reading, gardening, hiking and the arts. She resides in Housatonic with her husband, Ron Strickland, a retired professor of renaissance literature.
Director
Gwendolyn VanSant is an experienced organizational change consultant and coach who works at the intersection of diversity leadership, equity and inclusion, and strategic planning. She serves as a non-profit leader as the CEO and Founding Executive Director of BRIDGE and the principal & owner of consulting firm, Equity in Practice, LLC. A skilled community organizer, Gwendolyn is also a well-recognized thought leader on racial justice, reparations, gender equity and anti-poverty work. She is a pioneer in integrating research-based positive psychology practices into her equity and inclusion approach.
Adrian Alcalá is a professional software developer educated at MIT, with a wide range of programming experience including commercial web-based applications in the securities industry and 8 years of small business consulting in the southern Berkshires. He ran his own business in Great Barrington from 1989 to 1997 and served on the board and was an officer of the Southern Berkshire Chamber of Commerce for a number of years. He was also on the board of SHARE and was involved in early planning meetings for BerkShares. He and his wife, Sharon True, have raised their children in the Berkshires. Alcalá is very interested in promoting the regional economy using BerkShares. He particularly wants to focus on strategies that are appropriate for the current state of the economy and culture, while not losing sight of the eventual “ideal” outcome to which we aspire.
Christine Desan is the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She teaches about the international monetary system, the constitutional law of money, constitutional history, political economy, and legal theory. She is the co-founder of Harvard’s Program on the Study of Capitalism, an interdisciplinary project that brings together classes, resources, research funds, and advising aimed at exploring that topic. She is the author of Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2014) and the editor of Inside Money: Re-Theorizing Liquidity (in progress), and co-editor with Sven Beckert of Capitalism in America: New Histories (2018). She is the founder and managing editor of JustMoney.org, a website that explores money as a critical site of governance
Eric Harris-Braun designs and builds software infrastructure for the new economy. He is a co-founder of the MetaCurrency project, which is creating a platform for communities of all scales to design and deploy their own currencies, and Holochain, which will host a full array of asset-backed, value-stable currencies, setting a new class of cryptocurrencies that will foster a more regenerative world.
He is also the co-founder of Glass Bead Software, a provider of peer-to-peer networking applications, and of Harris-Braun Enterprises, a free-lance software development shop, which has created, among other things, complex data-collection websites for the health-care industry, an Android application for catch monitoring for the fishing industry, and the Online Writing Workshop, which it built and operates. In 1994 he published the Internet Directory ( Fawcett Columbine), which sold over 100,000 copies and went on to a second edition in 1996 before being made obsolete by Google.
Harris-Braun received a B.S. in Computer Science from Yale University. Currently, he lives in rural New York, where he is part of a Quaker Intentional community, plays with his two kids, tends a garden, and lives in a straw-bale house.
Robert Hockett is the Edward Cornell Professor of Law at Cornell Law School. His principal teaching, research, and writing interests lie in the fields of organizational, financial, and monetary law and economics in both their positive and normative, as well as their national and transnational, dimensions. His guiding concern in these fields is with the legal and institutional prerequisites to a just, prosperous, and sustainable economic order.
A Fellow of the Century Foundation and regular commissioned author for the New America Foundation, Hockett also does regular consulting work for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the International Monetary Fund, Americans for Financial Reform, the ‘Occupy’ Cooperative, and a number of federal and state legislators and local governments.
Alice Maggio is a Brooklyn-born and Berkshire-raised advocate, educator, and organizer dedicated to building economic institutions that distribute power and create community wealth. From 2012 to 2017 she worked at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, educating people in her own community and around the world about the potential of local currencies to serve as democratic tools for building more vibrant and resilient local economies. Maggio began her new economy work as a BerkShares Intern in May of 2012 and grew into her subsequent role as the Director of Programs at the Schumacher Center and Executive Director of BerkShares, Inc. She currently works as a senior project officer at The Working World, where she assists low-income communities in building cooperative businesses.