Which is your favourite way of saving resources and building community? Freecycling? Freegle? Freeconomy? Freelender? LetsAllShare.com? Ecomodo? Streetbank?
"There's nothing I own that can't be borrowed or fractionally owned”(Paul Crosland, co-director, Freelending CIC). This blog aspires to be a top UK source for information on the developments/developers within the 'sharing & gift economics' sector. Add your experiences of going beyond consumerism here too.
Please try ecomodo.com -the latest (& fastest growing?) new player in the 'sharing and gift economy' -and please let us know what you make of it as a website/proposition?
Feedback on what you make of ecomodo's pitch is welcome via:
Edmund & I met Meriel & Tracey (ecomodo) at UK Aware on Friday and gave them a couple of our new freelender packs, which Freelending CIC will gladly post to people involved in promoting sharing in their communities.
If the bigger agenda is one of finding the best tools to support sharing; ecomodo offers, IMHO, a significant step forward. I particularly like how the money made from renting out my stuff can support my favourite charity.
(By the way, my favourite charity is karuna.org; all money from renting out/selling my stuff goes there.)
If I lived in Brent and wanted to support a charity addressing the most important issues of how we relate to each other, I'd likely choose to support the Centre for Peaceful Solutions, which is led by Maria Arpa and who I interviewed briefly on Friday morning before the UK Aware Ethical Living exhibition:
I've been working to develop the networking all the relevant organisations together so that saving resources and building community can take us towards the holy grail of sustainability in how we live.
To this end, Edmund Johnson and I set up Freelending CIC in 2008. Please subscribe to this blog to stay in touch with the key developments not only for freelender.org but also for the more important wider social movement (generosity) to which we contribute all we can.
I'm so impressed with ecomodo that I've just selected a large number of facebook friends whom I've recommended to join the ecomodo facebook group.
Am I the only one with an ambivalent attitude to the Buy Nothing Day on 25th November 2009 in UK?
My intention is to do my shopping tonight (i.e the night before), so that I still have food to share at a training event tomorrow, but if I don't make it to the shops tonight, the sharing would be more important than the not-buying tomorrow.
I intend to start 'buy nothing day' tomorrow by adding 50 items (probably CDs and/or tools) to the most local (and flexible) library I know -freelender.org, so that there are some ways in which others can be supported to save money and share more.
In terms of the big picture, the imperative of our time is to consume less and to share more.By doing this I am confident that we will improve our quality if living. There's quite possibly no other way.Consuming less doesn't close down all businesses; only the wasteful ones.
I tweet about once a week about the vocation involved in finding a sharing response to the interesting times in which we live -try following this occasional twitter-stream.
So far, from lending, we have got everything lent out back, or received compensation that satisfies. Lending has been a highly satisfying experience and a great way to meet people. Sometimes, Edmund and I have second thoughts about how ambitious our project is, so we are looking at developing the site to help people share more firstly with people they know. If you are part of any group, club or society, lets talk about how freelender.org can help that group to share more. Email us via the freelender.org contact page.
If someone wants to borrow something from you, what would be your preferred way of them contacting you to let you know?
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How often do you imagine being comfortable with being asked to lend something?
Independent Candidate (2019-2029), promoting grassroots manifestoes (your 4-10 priority points) brought to form a convergent constituency manifesto.
Nationally I promote the Democratic Custom -no law change needed- "50 percent To Elect An MP" (& thus a "Deeper Legitimacy Parliament").
Locally I work on building non-monetary economic forms of rebuilding communiites.
Do you: -want anything? -know anybody who has anything they would share? -believe that if more took responsibility to share their stuff more, an even greater number would benefit?
If you register and offer an item or two, there's no obligation to lend anything and you may get an interesting email enquiry or two that may make all the difference.
Satisfaction of lenders currently 100%; items not returned as agreed: one Compensation was paid in full. www.freelender.org