There’s been a few conversations recently about ways we can more easily communicate about stuff we’d like to give away/share/have.
This could be the answer! – http://www.thesharehood.org/about
In a nutshell, it’s a tool for building community by encouraging people to share stuff with each other. It’s different (and in my opinion much better in lots of ways) from LETS schemes and freecycle. For a start, it’s deliberately very local – it’s set up so that you see the profiles of people who live within a 5 minute walk of your house. It’s not about setting up a local currency (although you can use it for that too if you want) for trading in a fairly traditional way and it’s not just about the one-off interaction with strangers that characterise most freecyle experiences.
It’s about meeting your neighbours, organising community events and building connections with people (partly on the basis of sharing possessions, skills and resources) in the real world. This would work well on a Co-op level and, even better, is a way of expanding our connections with the local community beyond that.
It’s really easy to create an account for yourself. A few people have joined in Romsey so far, so you’ll be able to see their profiles and the few things that people are already offering. You can offer as much or as little as you feel comfortable with. Obviously, the more people join, the more useful a resource it becomes and the more likely we are to find stuff we want and people who are interested in what we have to offer. So far, people are offering various things including a giving away a guitar, offering to lend books, to make cakes, to teach people to make bread, the loan of a video camera…and there’s only about 6 people signed up at the moment. Imagine if it were a couple of hundred!
There’s a plan to drop a note to all the houses in our neighbourhood, encouraging people to join. If you’d like to help write that and/or deliver it, email Rich or just sign up now and check it out.