Answers
What is a community voucher?
A community voucher is a token, paper or digital, issued by a local program and honoured voluntarily by participating businesses under rules the program publishes openly. It is not legal tender, not a bank deposit, and not issued by any government. Functionally it sits near a gift certificate, but with a civic purpose: keeping spending, attention, and goodwill inside a community.
Canada has real, verifiable precedents. Calgary Dollars began in 1995 as the Bow Chinook Barter Community, is run by the Arusha Centre, and relaunched with a digital platform in 2018, and it still operates today. The Toronto Dollar circulated as paper from 1998 to 2013; merchants redeemed it at 90 cents on the dollar, with the difference funding community programs, until volunteer capacity ran out. Smaller efforts such as Cochrane Dollars in Alberta (2017) followed the same voluntary pattern.
The Paper Penny is proposed as a voucher in this tradition: paper-first, QR-verifiable, honest about its status on every note. It is a proposal only: no city has adopted it, nothing is printed, and its rules would be published in full before a single voucher existed.
The Paper Penny is a proposed program. No city has adopted it yet. Owen Sound, Ontario is the proposed first pilot.
Paper Penny is a proposed community project by Mike Seiler (mikeseiler.ca), built on the map.ca stack. It is not legal tender, not a Royal Canadian Mint product, and not yet live in any city. The network map lives at PennyMap.ca.