GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. — Whenever Alice Maggio opens her wallet, she never hesitates about how to pay. It’s always cash, and it’s rarely dollars.

“They’re beautiful,” she coos as she shows off the colored bills, which are unlike any other. “You can take pride in spending them.”

Maggio frowns on dollars, preferring something else, called a BerkShares. The currency is available only in the Berkshires region of western Massachusetts. The area, which long ago embraced the organic and shop-local movements, decided in 2006 to take it a step further by creating its own currency. Town leaders hoped it would encourage people to shop only in stores in Berkshire County.

“When you have BerkShares in your pocket,” Maggio said, “you might not go to McDonald’s. You might choose to go to a locally owned restaurant.”

People can now walk into five banks across the county and change dollars into BerkShares. More than 400 businesses accept the alternative currency. Now 140,000 bills are in circulation, in denominations of 1, 5, 10, 20 and 50 that bear images of local heroes and landscapes.

The idea born in the rolling Berkshire hills is getting international attention: A Dutch nonprofit, the Doen Foundation, this week extended a half-million-dollar grant to expand the program so it can start offering loans.

“Partly as a result of the financial crisis, people no longer believe in banks, and banks are no longer willing to support many of the small, medium-size enterprises,” Doen’s director, Nina Tellegen, said from its headquarters in Amsterdam. “So by introducing this loan system within the BerkShares currency, that’s a very important next step.”

Her group focuses on local currencies around the world as a way to perhaps hedge against events like the euro crisis. The BerkShares program, she said, is one of the largest and most successful her group has worked with. It’s among the front-runners of local currencies, she said.

“They’ve been very successful in involving many people in the community,” Tellegen said. “With the BerkShare initiative … we hope to build a more sustainable and more social world.”