Freecycle.org Friends Circle - a Sharing/Reuse Concept

On average, it takes 20 times the weight of a consumer product in raw materials in order to make it: a 100 lb sofa takes 2,000 lbs in raw materials, and 98% of all waste is generated before we even buy a product. How can we, as consumers, tackle this waste dilemma?

Reuse via community building and sharing.

Freecycle.org has over 9.3 million users whom we wish to empower to share items (in addition to gifting them as they do now) by enabling community members to create their own Friends Circle in which they can *share* via gifting, *and* via lending/borrowing. NOBODY has cracked this nut yet.

Freecycle is the largest environmental community and gifting network on the planet and now we want to enable sharing. A drill has an average use life of 15 minutes: we need the hole in the wall, not the drill. Empower sharing now!

We are drowning in consumer-culture waste on every continent, in every country and in the sea. We need to drastically reduce our creation of such waste and we need a solution that empowers people to be the change rather than just pointing fingers at the problem. 

Circular economics refers to a cycle of cradle to cradle rather than cradle to grave. This means intercepting products along their life cycle and returning them to use as much as possible before completely RE-cycling them into the production cycle for new products. 

Freecycle.org is the largest gifting/environmental community on the planet. We are like a volunteer-run Craigslist for free stuff. We enable the re-gifting of over 32,000 used items a day in over 5,000 communities on a globally local basis from one community member to another.

We want to leverage this community and allow each of these individual to ALSO create their own Friends Circle where they may lend or borrow items as well as simply gifting items. This is the holy grail of the circular economy. We have AirBnB, Uber and any number of for-profit sharing options. But nobody has enabled true lending and borrowing between individuals. It's time we did.

As a nonprofit and the largest reuse community on the planet Freecycle is globally local and each local group is run by one of thousands of volunteers. Anyone can join for free and anyone may give or get a used item which no longer has monetary value but which still has remaining useful life.

As a “cyber-curbside” we are empowering everyone to experience that compassionate shift when someone picks up an item you were about to throw away and thanks you effusively. One may join to score free stuff, but with the first item shared, our consumptive tendencies shift to compassion and, yes, community pride. It draws on the best within us to change the planet. We can't always just be depressed about the world - we must also be empowered and inspired by the world around us.

Recipients tend to be lower income but it is open to all to gift or receive. Sharing with others beyond gifting is the next level -- friends helping friends in schools, churches, community groups, hobby groups: what would you like to share? Books, a hobby, children's items, tools? You decide in your Friends Circle.

The Friends Circle on Freecycle.org We are making it possible for anyone on the planet with access to the internet to create an online community of local Friends with whom they may gift, lend or borrow any items they please.

In doing so, it is our hope that amongst 20 or so friends, one drill is enough. Amongst 20 friends, a baby stroller can pass thru many children's lives. Amongst 20 friends, a book can be read and re-read with equal pleasure by all. A church group can collect items for those in need. A school can have a drive for needed supplies. A hobby group can share materials. Food canners may share mason jars. What would you like to share?

We already have local community-wide gifting groups. We are coding the ability to set up these smaller circles of trust amongst friends for existing and new members. This means the ability to invite friends via email or to select them from existing Freecycle.org peers or to invite them from their Facebook friends. It means coding the categories to enable each of us to create our own tags for sharing: like "hobby" or "church group" or "school supplies" or "tools" etc. It means doing outreach and education to all about these options and getting folks to use this new tool.

We have a huge head start since we are already getting millions of page views a month with people gifting in their community-wide groups so it's a small step to creating the next level of sharing in Friends Circles, but requires a good bit of coding and testing to get there.

All of what we offer is free and open to all. We are run by thousands of volunteers globally and by one engineer and one executive director. It's a thing of beauty which we can build on... with a little help from our friends.

Uber enables sharing of driving services. AirBnb enables sharing of homes. Who enables sharing of all our consumer products? Nobody.

But, each of us could benefit from the service a drill provides without all of us needing the drill. Freecycle Friends Circle can crack that nut and the planet needs it.

Humans are tribal and communal by nature. And, while it often *feels* like technology has done more to pull us apart than to pull us together, it doesn't have to be that way. The internet can be a tool for sharing and community building to the betterment of the planet.

One such example is the global Freecycle.org web community which empowers volunteers to run local gifting groups (in over 5,000 communities already) and enables community members to gift items to each other, one on one, with a handshake at the doorstep. You meet others, help others, receive help from others, and you build that interpersonal bond we all so need.

Ok, but what about sharing / lending and borrowing? NOBODY yet has successfully built a sharing circle for friends online. Until we learn to reuse and share all of our personal consumer products, the world will continue to sink under the weight of our waste.

Freecycle is ideally suited to empower this Friends Circle sharing concept based on our proven success with our existing community of millions of members. We just need to extend to them this additional space and functionality.

Friends Circle (FC) will be added as option to the existing Freecycle.org nonprofit web community of nearly 10 million members. Freecycle uses shareware and volunteer coders along with our one key lead engineer and our volunteer SysAdmin and contract coders as funds permit.

The front end of FC will be Sass. The back end will apply the Hapi web framework, server side NodeJS, Graph QL which sites atop the databasebase (MySQL), language: Java script, operating system: Linux/Debian. We already have about 65 servers this can reside on on the various continents and have already begun beta testing with our thousands of volunteer local group moderators.

It ain't our first time around the block. We scaled up our local gifting groups in 2009. This will apply the latest technology to both the existing gifting groups and to the Friends Circles which will not just include posts but also chat opportunities online as well as other community-building tools. Wouldn't we all like a bit of REAL charitable community in our lives? Give people the tools to build it and they will come! :-)

The environmental outcome we shall achieve is the expansion of a key building block in the circular economy: reuse. By empowering individual consumers to share and reuse, we keep items out of the landfill which no longer have monetary value but still have functional value by by coding an additional community area on Freecycle.org called the "Friends Circle."

Can we? Freecycle.org already enables over 9.3 million people to gift 32,0000 items to others in their own communities, like a Craigslist for free stuff with a large dose of community thrown in.

The US EPA notes that we each generate 4-5 pounds of garbage a day, but this represents only 2% of the waste our country creates. Even if we recycle every single item in our garbage can, 98% will still be out there. How do we get at that?

We break the linear consumption cycle through reuse. Reuse an old sofa and you keep 100 lbs out of a landfill and you keep 20 times that in raw materials, or one ton, from being used to make a new sofa (cotton, diesel, water - per Paul Hawkins). We, as consumers, become the solution.

Short term: I get a hole drilled in my wall without buying a drill. Medium term: fewer of us buy drills. Long term: we as a global economy consumer fewer resources, compounding our positive impact on waste reduction and expanding the circular economy via sharing and reuse.

Currently serving 9.3 million Freecycle.org users/members.

In one year: roughly the same as we complete the new site design.

In 5 years: 10 million member/users, an increase of 7.5% or 700,000 new members.

In one year: complete the site redesign, complete beta, complete pilot testing and begin live rollout to the public.

In five years, build on the community tools like more comprehensive chat options and sharing options which we could provide to an expanded and more engaged membership as they invite their friends and neighbors to join their Friends Circles. We will enable members to invite friends from Facebook and from other forums.

What is slowing us down the most are our financial limitations. We also have limited funding for marketing and PR. We have recently installled new translation tools that enable us to employ our vast volunteer network in completing translations into various languages across the globe: just completed Romanian, actually. That'll help a lot. The culture of giving and sharing does vary by culture which emphasizes the continuing need to have each local community group represented by a local volunteer.

Financial: We have launched an annual email appeal to our members and an annual holiday appeal on the site only, much like wikipedia does. And we are applying for funding like with this program.

Marketing and PR: we have a firm lined up to help us roll out the new site and the Friends Circle concept in the US and the UK.

1) We have two full-time staff: a lead engineer and an executive director.

2) We have part-time contractors who help with front and back end coding of the site (1-3 at any given time)

3) We have two volunteer sysadmin helpers.

4) We have a couple thousand volunteers, one per local group, who also help us with various management and leadership teams such as Group Outreach and Assistance, Help addy, New Group Approvers, Social Media Team and our global Hub Leadership Team.

Freecycle.org is the largest environmental reuse community on the planet per Alexa.com ratings. Our engineer has led the design and coding team to our pending beta testing which we are currently prepping. We have crews of volunteers doing Quality Assurance Review. There is no other comparable organization out there. Just need to give our gifters the chance to share in their own Friends Circle of trust as well. We're nearly there.

We have set up school gifting groups, a museum display sharing group in the UK working with all UK museums. We have partnered with Intuit, Nokia and Waste Management in the past. And we have community-wide gifting groups in over 5,000 communities in over a 110 countries, many of which are linked to by their city and community websites, etc. Not really sure where to start on this one.

We survive via grants, underwriting, donations from the public and from advertising royalties / eyeballs on Freecycle.org. One email appeal to all members annually and one holiday site appeal, and royalties cover the bulk of our expenses. But it's not enough to cover short-term coding needs for an entirely new website segment such as the Friends Circle.

Our members keep over a 1,000 tons a day out of landfills each day via gifting of used items that no longer have monetary value but do have functional value: that community building and environmental impact is our gift.

We are already sustainable. Our financials are publicly viewable on Freecycle.org.

We just need a little boost to cover short-term coding needs to expand our mission. The same donations and royalties will cover this expanded mission in the same fashion as it does our current freecycle.org community. We can show you mockups or our alpha Friends Circle if you are curious to learn more.

We are seeking to unlock an entirely new segment of the global economy using the power of the internet: peer-to-peer sharing of used/personal/consumer goods. We are building this market segment from scratch. While we have already established used-item *gifting* communities in over 110 countries, we wish to expand this to encompass *sharing/lending* amongst friends. Nobody has achieved this yet.

Needs: societal/economic/academic know-how as to the best possible UI to enable the sharing of items amongst individuals (How do we best loan out that drill and get it back so that all are happy? What would be a good rating system when all is free? How best to create Friends Circles: tags?, groups?); coding expertise/advice/reviewers and actual coders, for example, of Node.js; hump funding: we are able to support a functioning global web community, but we need financial help taking our website and collaborative consumption up to the next technical level. We can drive the car just fine and have thousands of volunteers helping us, but need help getting a new engine dropped into as we speed down the highway with 9 million+ occupants. Finally, we need help planning PR for the final product.

FYI: we have one lead engineer and one executive director and a couple of part-time contractors so you can imagine where the gaps may lie in planning, implementing & promoting such a large and complex site which remains simple to use while keeping 75 servers going which receive 20 million pageviews a month.

We are able to operate on a very limited budget with a great deal of help from volunteers, but as is obvious from the dated appearance of our website, there are trade-offs in coding and design and in marketing and PR to get out the word that we have this amazing group of "under the radar" recycling and reuse people literally all over the place. Having a close look at how we fund Freecycle.org and how we promote this gem in the rough would be of great benefit.

Maybe there is an opportunity for a partnership with a for-profit entity to help us grow to the next level? Perhaps a foundation with a similar environmental mission would be interested in collaboration? Professors and students who have economic/societal or technical skills to create an entirely new "sharing" market segment for the planet. We are very open to ideas.