Community organizer and entrepreneur Karla Ballard envisions a world where social capital ranks high alongside monetary capital.
It is the foundation of her company, Ying, a platform for sharing skills and tasks where communities can care for each other and share talents and time. Ballard said she grew up with a strong social network in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, and after a career in the public and private sectors, she started working on the platform in 2015 while living in Los Angeles, driven by the idea that others should have that too.
Ballard’s background is in finance and banking, but her mentor and an originator of the concept of “time banking,” Edgar Cahnhad a seed planted in her head about what capitalism could be.
“I’m pro-capitalism, but I’m expanding the definition of it. As a banker, it was important to understand the financial market, but also to understand community capital and social capital, she said. “We don’t really capture with our GDP the true essence of what our society is made of.”
So Ying was born as a platform for people to share and receive help with everyday tasks like cooking, graphic design, dog walking or simply picking up mail when you’re on vacation. A community—a neighborhood, an apartment complex, a school, or some other group—is set up on the platform, and each member starts with 24 balance chips, representative of how many hours each of us has in a day.
Ying’s mobile platform. (Courtesy photo)
“It’s no, ‘What if they have a Harvard degree?’ – it does not matter. This is community capital. There are no more people being wasted, Ballard said. “Your hour of humanity is worth no more.”
Users can pay others in the community with tokens for shared tasks or skills, and receive them when they offer their own skills. The platform will soon use blockchain technology for purchases, and will include payments in US dollars in the coming months, Ballard said.
After developing Ying for a few years in LA, and working on a beta version with a group of around 1,500 people in 2017 and 2018, a family emergency brought Ballard home to Philadelphia in 2019. With the support of Knight Foundationshe collaborated with Leonzo Vargas on GLBL VLLGa community of creatives and artists in Philadelphia, and the couple envisioned what Ying could look like in Philly.
“He really made me fall in love with my city so much,” Ballard said. “It was one of those things that, ‘This was.’ [meant] to be in the city with brotherly love and sisterly affection.'”
When the pandemic hit, and the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis followed shortly after in May 2020, subsequent protests and organizing across the city reinforced for Ballard that Philadelphia was a good home for a community-building platform. Since the company’s inception, the founder said she has raised $1.3 million and grown her team to seven people, most of whom live in Philly. The platform is up and running with some Philadelphia and DC users, two cities Ballard says have the kind of community capacity needed for it to thrive.
A 3.0 version of the Ying platform is coming in October, including Ying Alerts – work that can be picked up for traditional payment. A business might need help sweeping or cleaning, or a neighbor might need their sidewalk shoveled, Ballard said, which is similar to traditional gigging, or “like hyperlocal Fiverr.”
Ballard’s goal with the company is to help reinforce that local communities have intrinsic value when they share resources and skills among themselves.
“Our person is mission-driven. They care about something more than themselves, Ballard said. “It’s someone who has the ability to care about their community.”
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