Blog http://docs.buynothingproject.org Buy Nothing Project Blog Posts ru Hatred and Sedition Are Not Welcome in the Buy Nothing Project http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/mgm2m2avx1-hatred-and-sedition-are-not-welcome-in-t http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/mgm2m2avx1-hatred-and-sedition-are-not-welcome-in-t?amp=true Fri, 15 Jan 2021 20:24:00 +0300 BNP Founders As we become aware of Buy Nothing Project group leaders who participated in the protest and violent insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6th, we are taking action to remove them from all of the support groups we host or ...

Hatred and Sedition Are Not Welcome in the Buy Nothing Project

As we become aware of Buy Nothing Project group leaders who participated in the protest and violent insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6th, we are taking action to remove them from all of the support groups we host or steward to provide resources, mentorship, training, and group development assistance to people around the world who are helping their communities join this movement. We also maintain a public online list of all groups that identify as part of the Buy Nothing movement around the world, and we will continue to remove from this list and its associated maps all groups led by people who took part in derailing the function of the United States Congress on January 6th. Should there be future such events, we will expand our work to remove people who take part in those.
We base our decisions on reliable reporting from responsible journalists as well as from personal direct communication, and will take action wherever we have the power. We cannot take any action to remove leaders or members from any local Buy Nothing gift economy group, as these groups are all independently led. If your local group is led or impacted by people from active hate groups, or people who are actively working to destroy norms of pluralistic democratic governance, we urge you to use the Start A Group resources on our website to create a new group for your community, in line with the Buy Nothing Project’s mission. You can learn more about the Buy Nothing movement in the Community Agreement created by the Equity Team to support conversations and connections between people, and in the Fine Print that provides an open source foundation for each Buy Nothing group.
– Liesl Clark & Rebecca Rockefeller, Buy Nothing Project co-founders and co-volunteers, 15 January 2021]]> New Beta Release and Global Launch Update http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/exrr4yjn31-new-beta-release-and-global-launch-updat http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/exrr4yjn31-new-beta-release-and-global-launch-updat?amp=true Sun, 10 Oct 2021 23:17:00 +0300 BNP Founders Hello everyone! Sending out a HUGE thank you to all that have been using the BuyNothing app and providing feedback over the last 3 months, and a special thank you to the Beta Community Guides! We’ve heard...

New Beta Release and Global Launch Update

Hello everyone! Sending out a HUGE thank you to all that have been using the BuyNothing app and providing feedback over the last 3 months, and a special thank you to the Beta Community Guides! We’ve heard you all. In the next week or two we’ll be releasing some exciting new features to all 8 Beta Communities. Sign up on the waitlist if you haven’t already or see if your community is a Beta Community. This is a big release, but more on that to come later!
We’re also excited to learn that of all the 45,000+ signups on our waitlist, 70% of them are people who are not part of a Buy Nothing Facebook group at all. It is extremely rewarding to see this part of our mission come to fruition: reaching as many people as possible through our local BuyNothing gift economies, especially those who have not participated in one yet or have been unable to access one.
We’ve previously announced that our global open-to-all release of the BuyNothing app would be mid September, however we are pushing that back into October. Our upcoming Beta release is packed with performance improvements and exciting user-requested features and we want to offer them to our Beta communities prior to launching globally. We will share our October global launch date toward the end of this month. Stay tuned!]]> http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/pf9lgpa7c1-introducing-new-edition-of-rules-amp-sel Buy Nothing™ http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/fpfcpeptl1-buy-nothing http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/fpfcpeptl1-buy-nothing?amp=true Fri, 18 Jun 2021 23:20:00 +0300 BNP Founders Greetings, Buy Nothing World – It has come to our attention that there is active sharing of intentional misinformation regarding many aspects of the Buy Nothing Project. Today, we want to focus on one of them ....

Buy Nothing™

Greetings, Buy Nothing World –
It has come to our attention that there is active sharing of intentional misinformation regarding many aspects of the Buy Nothing Project. Today, we want to focus on one of them: Our trademarking of the Buy Nothing Project name.
Yes, we currently hold a trademark of our Buy Nothing name in several countries. We are protecting our Buy Nothing name for two main reasons:

We need to protect our name so that everyone who sets up a Buy Nothing community is able to use the Buy Nothing name to signify their participation in this movement.
We need to protect our Buy Nothing name so that we can continue using it as we build new and freely-given support structures and resources to nurture this movement and make it more widely accessible.
Anyone who tells you that we intend to make you stop using the name Buy Nothing to describe your non-commercial gift economy on any platform, offline or online, is misleading you. We are happy to see so many communities embracing our name and identifying themselves as part of the Buy Nothing Project. We simply require that you register with us and link back to our website. Every registered Buy Nothing community is part of a global movement that has been fueled by millions of people who have joined our experiment to Give, Ask, and express Gratitude with their neighbors.
PS: Have you visited our Freesources page recently? We have a lot of freely-given tools you can use to build your own Buy Nothing community right now. Check back often, as we add new Buy Nothing resources as quickly as we can create them.]]> Fine Print Update http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/dok7bb8c61-fine-print-update http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/dok7bb8c61-fine-print-update?amp=true Mon, 07 Jun 2021 00:16:00 +0300 BNP Founders We’ve made a few updates to the Fine Print document, which is the foundational guide and standards for Buy Nothing Project groups on Facebook. Based on lessons we’ve learned over the past 8 years, ...

Fine Print Update

We’ve made a few updates to the Fine Print document, which is the foundational guide and standards for Buy Nothing Project groups on Facebook. Based on lessons we’ve learned over the past 8 years, we have updated our wording to make it possible for Buy Nothing communities on Facebook to use the Fine Print for either a Flexible Members, Soft Boundaries model or for the One Group Per Person, Give Where You Live model. It’s our hope as co-founders of the Buy Nothing Project that each Buy Nothing community will find the approach that works best for them to build connections between people and offer everyone access to a thriving gift economy. ]]> BuyNothing App Press Release #2 http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/12hrux27z1-buynothing-app-press-release-2 http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/12hrux27z1-buynothing-app-press-release-2?amp=true Thu, 03 Jun 2021 00:19:00 +0300 BNP Founders BuyNothing App Begins Global Debut on Bainbridge Island, Washington – Where it all Began

BuyNothing App Press Release #2

Wednesday, June 2, 2021 For Immediate Release
The BuyNothing App will officially debut on Bainbridge Island, Washington this morning. The small and tight-knit island community is where the international Buy Nothing Project began more than 8 years ago as a neighborhood social experiment. The Buy Nothing movement has since grown exponentially to more than 4 million participants globally, across 44 countries. The BuyNothing app’s debut on Bainbridge Island today will be the first of eight hyperlocal rollouts scheduled this summer as part of the BuyNothing App’s beta release process.

ShareThing, Inc., the company behind the BuyNothing app, is scheduled to make the app more broadly available to the global Buy Nothing Project community in a few months. The founders of ShareThing, a team including Liesl Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller – the co-founders of the Buy Nothing Project – seek to make the app a more equitable and inclusive alternative to the current limited avenues for engagement with the global and rapidly growing movement.

In describing what Buy Nothing Project loyalists and new participants alike can expect from the app’s user experience, ShareThing co-founder and Head of Product, Lucas Rix said, “Not much! 🙂 Our beta app is functionally minimal, as are most beta launches. But we now have in place a foundation that, with the help of our community members, we will purposefully shape and evolve into a truly inviting, safe, and wonderful place for people to share with one another.”

The ShareThing team is advised by a truly diverse and world-class team of expert advisors including members of the Global Buy Nothing Project Volunteer Leadership Team, senior executives, technical experts, and legal and strategic advisors from leading firms and technology companies like Lyft, Google, FiscalNote, and Huge. Advisors include a world-leading machine learning and artificial intelligence professor (data equity strategy) and the Director of the COVID-19 Testing Task Force for a high-profile U.S. state (strategic operations).

The Buy Nothing Project community has grown by a third since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The ShareThing team looks forward to helping promote and steward continued exponential growth across the movement with the help of the app. Asked about the app’s debut, ShareThing co-founder and Co-CEO, Tunji Williams said: “We look forward to telling the Buy Nothing story to millions of new participants from across the globe, in communities in every corner of the world. We are building our values into this product out of love for a community that continues to make the Buy Nothing project a shining example of what’s possible when folks come together in a spirit of abundance and empathy. The possibilities are endless. We believe the world is ready for an upgrade to the traditional market economy. There’s room for improvement, and we want to be part of the change we hope to see in the world. That’s what we’re about.”

About ShareThing, Inc. ShareThing, Inc. is an early-stage app development company and the maker of the BuyNothing app—a mobile-first and web-optimized, peer-to-peer resource-sharing application, designed to facilitate and empower people in their reuse, recycling, gifting and sharing of material goods and services within their “hyperlocal” gift economy communities. The BuyNothing app is designed to be a proprietary platform to house the global Buy Nothing Project movement. The company aims to grow the app and the community to reach billions worldwide and take on the reusable waste generated by the $27 trillion global retail market, an untapped and abundant resource that builds our communities and reconnects neighbors across socioeconomic and other divides.]]> What We Learned After 8 Years In Facebook Groups http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/m0xaij9ff1-what-we-learned-after-8-years-in-faceboo http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/m0xaij9ff1-what-we-learned-after-8-years-in-faceboo?amp=true Sat, 29 May 2021 00:20:00 +0300 BNP Founders We’d like to talk about groups, boundaries, “sprouts,” our outdated “one group per person” rule, and the problematic structure of the Buy Nothing Project as it exists on Facebook. We’re grateful to Facebook for their ...

What We Learned After 8 Years In Facebook Groups

We’d like to talk about groups, boundaries, “sprouts,” our outdated “one group per person” rule, and the problematic structure of the Buy Nothing Project as it exists on Facebook. We’re grateful to Facebook for their free Groups platform that we used originally to empower people around the world to create Buy Nothing communities for themselves. We’ve learned a lot over the past 8 years, and have come to appreciate the damage that comes along with the benefits of using Groups as the defining structure of this movement.
Here are a few truths we’ve learned about online gift economies:

Gift economies function when people trust each other.
People have an easier time trusting each other when there are connections and mutual friendships between community members.
These connections and mutual friendships are easier to build and see when online gift economy groups have 1,000 or fewer members.
Online gift economy groups function best when people commit to one group, so that they only have to monitor one stream of comments.
Online groups that have real-world geographic boundaries beget a climate of exclusion, gatekeeping, and a sort of border patrol mentality that is fundamentally out of alignment with our Buy Nothing Project philosophy and goals.
Online groups that use real-world geographic boundaries are going to replicate historic lines of segregation and other injustices, such as Redlining, that are worked through many nation’s neighborhoods.
Gift economies are egalitarian at their core and function best when each participant is on equal footing, with equal agency, to make their own choices.
Online Facebook Groups are not an egalitarian structure.

Dealing with Group Growth through Sprouting & Capping
When we selected Facebook as the first home for our Buy Nothing Project experiment, we were committing to using Groups as the structure that would allow people to access a local gift economy. We learned very quickly that groups that had more than 1,000 members began to drift into a sort of chaos, in which many Asks and Gives were unseen and unmet, because there was simply too much happening. Also, people began to feel unsafe because the mutual connections and real life relationships that build trust were harder to see, or no longer present. People grow frustrated in this situation and turn to other online portals for simultaneous posting of their Gives and Asks, and this leads to more confusion and frustration that further erodes the trust and joy that grow in smaller gift economy groups.
If you choose to stay in an online group structure you’re going to have to deal with growth. Online Groups reach a tipping point when there are so many participants that trying to serve as admin becomes more than a full time job, and group participants also become frustrated and angry with each other as it becomes more and more difficult for people to Buy Nothing. To address this problem, we experimented with helping unsustainably large Facebook groups transform, or “sprout,” into smaller, more hyper-local groups. We’ve also helped groups “cap” their membership at a sustainable number of participants, and then inviting the creation of “sibling groups” that serve the same area. All of these practices make people feel excluded, they tear relationships apart, and they are problematic especially when new groups divide and segregate communities.
When you’re trying to build an egalitarian gift economy within a structure that isn’t egalitarian, there are extra challenges. We have been trying to meet this challenge for 8 years now, and we know many of you may want to carry on with this work, using Facebook Groups as the host for your Buy Nothing experience. With that in mind, here are some concrete ways we call on you to take action to address the systemic injustices present in online group gift economies that rely on admins as gatekeepers within a boundaried geographic location. We know there are other possible actions, and hope you will approach this through discussions with your Buy Nothing community, to come up with an approach that addresses these concerns:
Boundaries
When we committed to using Groups, we also set up a situation where we used neighborhood names to identify Buy Nothing Project groups on Facebook. Group admins requested maps with polygons showing their group regions, so that others could establish nearby groups to provide everyone with a local Buy Nothing group, ensuring that no portions of any region were left out.. However, when people divide themselves into groups, with boundaries to keep one group separate from another, this very act creates a mindset of exclusion and us vs them that we need to address. One way is to let community members decide for themselves which communities they identify as their own. We get hundreds of email messages each week, from people around the world who want to Buy Nothing. The top questions are, “When will I be able to do this off Facebook?,” “Why can’t I join more than 1 group?,” and “Why have I been removed or not admitted to my local Buy Nothing group on Facebook?” All of these questions speak to the ways in which the structure we have created within Facebook’s Groups platform have created a climate of gatekeeping and exclusion that has prevented people from connecting with the real-world communities they are part of.
There is only one gift economy group that we make decisions for, and it’s our own local Buy Nothing group where we live. To address these issues for our community, we are moving to the BuyNothing app, where each of us will have the agency to identify for ourselves where we’d like to share. We hope you’ll join us there to help us bring this movement to life in new ways that are more accessible and less divisive. We’re building digital architecture that will allow each of us to monitor one stream of Gives, Asks, and Gratitude that’s under your personal control.
If you choose to stay on Facebook, we encourage you to remove any street boundaries that your group may have and just identify your group with a place name. Soft boundaries can be a graceful way of providing guidance for where the sharing takes place, but without strict enforcement that excludes people who are active community members. Many streets, especially highways, have served to reinforce racial divides and in an effort to dismantle our own use of a divisive system, we’d like to undo the steps we may have taken to reinforce historic redlining which marginalized entire communities of people. For instance, when highways were built in the US, especially through major cities, they reinforced racial divides within those cities, and now many cities are removing those very highways in an effort to heal the divides. We encourage each Buy Nothing Facebook group to do the same: remove those borders, stop policing them, and allow for people to choose and define their own communities for sharing.
We realize there is a resource map that shows where Buy Nothing Facebook groups exist. We are rethinking what the Buy Nothing groups map will look like in the future and if we even have one at all, as there are so many communities worldwide, on many platforms, and overlapping with each other, multiple groups in one locale, etc.
One Group Rule
Further, if we drop the concern about the one group rule and trust that people will connect with others where it works for them, there can be a slackening in the gatekeeping within your gift economy. We’ve noticed that it’s very difficult for people to participate in more than one gift economy fully. We each also tend to commit to the communities where we feel welcome. For Facebook Buy Nothing group admins, the practicalities of these suggestions, to move toward more equitable giving, would mean removing your boundaries from your group description and to simply use a place name, while welcoming anyone who identifies themselves as a member of your community. You can also slacken the one group rule and put your trust in people, and the fact that they will truly commit to the local gift economies that work best for their needs. Having options in both the BuyNothing app as well as Facebook groups or any other giving platform is the kind of abundance we’ve envisioned for years. This is our ultimate dream, that sharing together becomes the norm, no matter where you are or what platform you use to connect with people.
We have been asked by many if the one group rule applies to the app, too. If you’re in the app, does that mean you cannot participate in your Facebook group? Absolutely not! The app will be freely available to anyone with a smart phone or tablet, or computer with internet access. We welcome everyone, including people who are in other versions of Buy Nothing groups and other gift economies, on any and all platforms. Each and every gift economy contributes to a more sustainable and compassionate world; the more gift economies there are, the more likely it is that everyone will find one that works for them, or several that work for them. All giving is good giving, there is no such thing as too many gift economies. Eventually, we each find what works for us and choose to focus our time and energy within the communities where sharing can be integrated in our daily lives with ease and joy.
Admins/Moderators
For Facebook groups, “admins” are required to set up and maintain each group, approve membership requests, and perform other Facebook-specific tasks to keep groups open and active. This puts Admins in a position of power over group participants. This power is a necessary function of this online group architecture, and many admins (perhaps even the majority) exercise their power wisely and with compassion. Sometimes, though, this power is used to prevent people from joining a Buy Nothing community they identify with, or to remove people for reasons that aren’t in alignment with the Buy Nothing Project’s principles. Even when admin power is used well, it’s still power over others and this very structure subverts the democratic principles of a gift economy.
Here’s a piece written by LaTonya Baldwin, one of the Buy Nothing Project’s first volunteers, writing about her experiences and observations of this phenomenon: https://www.buynothingprojectequity.com/post/building-communities-or-building-walls
Egalitarian communities are not possible under this model, as Admins have the power to admit people and/or remove them. This single factor may be one of the most challenging we’ve faced, with regards to how we behave as humans and when faced with that power there will be some of us who will use that power in a way that may harm others (whether intended or not.) We would like to find a way to create a more democratic experience for everyone, so we each can make our own choices, especially about the community we identify as our own. The platform we’re building, that will be freely accessible via our app, will hold everyone equally accountable to the BuyNothing principles while empowering each person to curate their own community and Give, Ask, and Share as they choose.
Our Personal Accountability
We are writing this as the two co-founders of the Buy Nothing Project. When we speak out about these issues, we hear from some volunteer Buy Nothing Facebook group admins that they feel we are “throwing them under the bus.” Our desire is to throw ourselves under the bus. We started this experiment; we made the choice to use Facebook Groups as our platform; we incubated thousands of groups and have provided free support and guidance for thousands of volunteer admins; we helped create the sprouting and capping protocols; we attempted to address the inequities that arose in local Buy Nothing groups within the free materials we created and online support. But we cannot get around the fact that a structure with unequal power begets systemic injustices. Because we made these choices, and because our intent was not the same as our impact, we are taking responsibility: We are working now to create a new iteration of the Buy Nothing Project informed by all of these lessons, with new voices in the mix, so that we can offer the world a more accessible, more responsive platform that we hope will give each of us equal agency to participate in the Buy Nothing movement.
We’re building our app to address the lessons we’ve learned from 8 years on Facebook, and also to greatly expand the scope of Buy Nothing. Gift economies have great power to bring about lasting positive change for individuals and communities, and there is much of our Buy Nothing philosophy that we haven’t included in the Buy Nothing experience on Facebook. We’re excited to bring more of this depth and breadth to the Buy Nothing app experience. We hope you will join us and learn new lessons about how we can improve the Buy Nothing movement, to make our shared impact even stronger and more positive.
Yours in Buying Nothing,
Liesl Clark & Rebecca Rockefeller]]> BuyNothing App Press Release #1 http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/8nm53o8bc1-buynothing-app-press-release-1 http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/8nm53o8bc1-buynothing-app-press-release-1?amp=true Wed, 05 May 2021 00:22:00 +0300 BNP Founders The Buy Nothing Project is Building a Custom Sharing App!In an effort to reach even more people around the globe to join in the sharing economy, the Buy Nothing Project is expanding beyond Facebook...

BuyNothing App Press Release #1

The Buy Nothing Project is Building a Custom Sharing App!
In an effort to reach even more people around the globe to join in the sharing economy, the Buy Nothing Project is expanding beyond Facebook on to their own free BuyNothing platform! The all volunteer-run social movement, started on Bainbridge Island, WA in 2013 by Rebecca Rockefeller and Liesl Clark has grown to 4 million participants worldwide, in over 6000 Facebook groups and 44 nations. Twelve thousand volunteers currently steward the Buy Nothing Project’s local gift economy open-source rules and standards, bringing the sharing mindset to people in 37 languages. The new BuyNothing custom platform will be for all devices, including laptops, smart phones and tablets. Everyone can sign up for the app at https://www.buynothingapp.com/

“It’s clear that collectively our ‘consumer muscle’ has been overused, and we want to show the world that it’s possible to use that muscle in revolutionary ways: by sharing more, buying less, and creating a social safety net with our neighbors so we can pool resources and share radically for the common good,” said app co-founder Liesl Clark.
Rebecca and Liesl have teamed up with Lucas Rix (software product strategist) and Tunji Williams (software entrepreneur) to craft a more equitable sharing experience for all Buy Nothing Project participants with the best technology available out there. For more details about the app and to connect with the app’s founders, please send your media inquiries to info@sharething.com

Over the nearly 8 years the Buy Nothing Project has been in existence, millions of dollars-worth of goods and services have been shared and countless tons of perfectly reusable items have been diverted from landfills. The app will ultimately enable us to quantify how much each community is saving from landfills and incinerators, with each participant saving money while building priceless bonds with neighbors nearby.
This May, the Buy Nothing Project will launch the beta BuyNothing app on the Apple and Google App Stores to select communities around the world. And soon after that they will launch to everyone, and on every device. The global waitlist for the app has organically grown to over 12,000 participants in 2 months, and continues to grow exponentially week-over-week. You will soon be able to Give, Ask, Borrow, Lend, and express your Gratitude on a platform built for any community, where we each can develop features that are perfect for expanding the gift economy mindset worldwide.
Reach out to the BuyNothing app team to learn more and to join us!

Signup to join our Global Launch Waitlist
Interested in our May Beta Launch?
Sign up for our Beta Launch (available in select locations)
Other links that may be helpful:

Sincerely,
Liesl, Rebecca, Tunji & Lucas
Co-Founders & Co-Volunteers
The Buy Nothing Project & The BuyNothing App]]> New BuyNothing App Update! http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/r4r9ssb0t1-new-buynothing-app-update http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/r4r9ssb0t1-new-buynothing-app-update?amp=true Thu, 25 Mar 2021 00:23:00 +0300 BNP Founders We’re excited to share with you a sneak peek at our Landing Page and working logo of our New BuyNothing app!We’re on track for beta testing this May...

New BuyNothing App Update!

We’re excited to share with you a sneak peek at our Landing Page and working logo of our New BuyNothing app!

We’re on track for beta testing this May.
Beta Testing News:
We’re getting very close to beta test time! We still have some space for beta test cluster communities in Australia, Canada, and the United States. If you’re interested in joining one of these clusters, please sign up via our waitlist form on our new website, https://www.buynothingapp.com
What we’re looking for in a beta test group:

Participants who will dedicate at least a month to sharing exclusively on the app.
We hope to have at least 500 people in each test cluster. So, if you’re interested please get your friends and neighbors to sign up so we can make it happen in your hometown!

Sign up for Beta Testing via the form at: https://www.buynothingapp.com
App Development Work Flow: We’ve launched into the app development process in earnest. We’re working in “weekly sprint cadences.” That means each week we work with the development team to determine what discrete portion(s) of the project (as defined by the agreed-upon scope) the team will build in the coming week. The team spends each week building the agreed-upon discrete element(s) and returns to us at the end of the week to show us their work-product and to solicit our feedback. We repeat the same process each week (for about 8 – 9 weeks) until the “closed beta” version of the application is completed in May. This weekly cadence offers a tight feedback/iterative loop that will help to keep us intimately aligned with the development team throughout the development process. We’re now entering into our third week of development, and things are getting more exciting each day.
App Look & Feel:

In addition to core functionality that will enable you to share with neighbors as you do today, we are extremely excited to introduce some new features that we know you will absolutely love (because you’ve told us how much you want them).
We’re already working on more features to make sharing and building community all that much easier for everyone who loves being part of gift economy culture. We’re excited to add these to our app as each feature is ready to launch, so expect new developments on a regular basis over time.
We believe what we’re building has the possibility to truly change our real world experiences in our communities.
We believe the possibilities will be endless with regards to how we can give/ask/share gratitude more readily with our neighbors and communities.
We are building this app from the ground up to empower each person using it to build community and connections in ways that work for them. We each have complicated identities and are members of multiple communities, and our app respects this reality.

Buy Nothing Project in the News:
If you’ve missed them, the following are some samples of the news coverage the project has received in the past few weeks. We’re growing, as evidenced by the increased awareness about the Project in the media and with the numbers of people signing up, and hence our email inbox is full of media inquiries each day! Our gratitude to the Buy Nothing community leaders and participants who take the time for these interviews. Your stories are an inspiration!

]]> The Buy Nothing Project Is Building A Custom Sharing App http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/u5d66tzti1-the-buy-nothing-project-is-building-a-cu http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/u5d66tzti1-the-buy-nothing-project-is-building-a-cu?amp=true Tue, 02 Feb 2021 01:24:00 +0300 BNP Founders We’re excited to share some big news with the world. We’re finally actively building a custom platform for Buy Nothing sharing, a BuyNothing app where we can each Buy Nothing & Share Everything. We’re just in the beginning...

The Buy Nothing Project Is Building A Custom Sharing App

We’re excited to share some big news with the world. We’re finally actively building a custom platform for Buy Nothing sharing, a BuyNothing app where we can each Buy Nothing & Share Everything. We’re just in the beginning stages of development, but our plan is for it to be a free experience for everyone to Give, Ask, and share their Gratitude on any device. We’ll be able to add features that will address the pain points we experience with the Facebook Groups architecture as well as add some new features we think people will really love. Our app will not replace the Buy Nothing Project, it will be a platform built from scratch to host the Buy Nothing movement as it continues to grow.

FAQs:
Will the Buy Nothing Facebook groups remain as they are? PLEASE KNOW, THE FACEBOOK BUY NOTHING GROUPS WILL BE HERE AS LONG AS PEOPLE WOULD LIKE TO LEAD AND USE THEM. You will be able to continue in your Facebook groups as you have been, and you and your group participants will also be able to use our new platform as well. We believe it will provide a new way of sharing for all users, and it will evolve to meet our needs as Givers and Askers, in sharing and conserving our abundant resources, over time. Our open source movement allows groups to exist wherever people want to build them. We believe our app will be the best home for Buy Nothing groups, and we invite you to help us build it to meet your wants and needs.
How do I sign up? We’d love for you and your fellow community members to sign up on our waitlist to be the first users of the app. You can find it here: https://www.buynothing.live/

Can I invite my friends? Yes! The only way our new BuyNothing app will work for you is if enough of your friends and neighbors join, too. Please go to our public Facebook page and share our announcement there with your group.

We hope to have several community clusters as part of our beta testing, so if you have a community of people you know would like to try sharing on BuyNothing, please urge your friends and neighbors to sign up for the waitlist. We’ll keep track of the clusters and be in touch to invite you to be our earliest adopters. We define a cluster as a group of at least 50 people.
What is the timing for the BuyNothing app? We aim to roll BuyNothing out in May of 2021. In other words: Soon!
Why are you building this BuyNothing app? We have heard, loudly and clearly, from Buy Nothing participants over the years. We are building our custom app to address existing issues and to expand the impact and scope of our original Buy Nothing Project experiment. We’ve categorized the concerns that have been shared with us by tens of thousands of people into the following, and we are building the BuyNothing app from the ground up to address these issues:
Facebook: Every day we hear from people who want to participate in the Buy Nothing Project but are not willing to use Facebook, or are in the process of de-activating their Facebook accounts.
No Group In The Area: Thousands of people want to join our movement, but there are no Buy Nothing Facebook groups in their area and don’t have the time or inclination to set up a new group.
Difficulty Joining a Group: Thousands of people contact us because they’ve requested to join existing Buy Nothing groups on Facebook but have been unable to contact group admins or have been somehow lost in the shuffle.
Inactive groups: Out of the over 6000 Buy Nothing groups that are in existence today, some of the groups have admins who are inactive, so the membership queues to join the groups have thousands of people waiting to get in, to share.
Boundaries: We recognize that Buy Nothing geographic group boundaries are a construct that can serve to exclude members of society, either consciously or unconsciously. In many places, group boundaries serve to divide communities along lines that reflect systemic injustice and segregation.
Inclusion, Accessibility, Equity and Justice: These are goals we’ve been working towards, but too often our intent has not matched our impact.
Custom Features: For 7.5 years, we’ve built a network of hyper-local gift economies using Facebook Groups. We’ve outgrown this architecture and are ready for a platform that wants to rush to meet this movement’s needs. With our BuyNothing app, we can serve the Buy Nothing movement, building a platform that will include features we know Buy Nothing community groups and participants need to thrive, based on everything we’ve learned so far as well as user surveys and interviews that are currently underway. We’re also dreaming of new custom features that will allow each of us to expand our Buy Nothing impact; make sharing gifts of stuff and self easier, more inclusive, and more equitable; and empower us to track our collective impact on society and our beautiful planet. We have a blank slate to work with, and many ideas we’d like to see come to fruition in the future.

How is this app being funded? We tried to do user subscription funding for our first go at this, with SOOP, and found that we weren’t able to raise enough to get it off the ground. We returned the funds to those of you who contributed (thank you!) and went back to the drawing board. We’ve joined forces with Tunji Williams and Lucas Rix to form ShareThing, a B-Corp funded by angel seed investors (our friends and family) who are willing to help fund our build of the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) BuyNothing app. Working on this app as ShareThing allows us to preserve the noncommercial social movement aspect of the Buy Nothing Project independent from the construction and maintenance of this new mobile and web app. This will be a solid v1.0 starting point with the important basic functions that allow each of us to Buy Nothing, Share Everything. We will not be paid for this labor of building the MVP because we want to target our resources directly into app development. If we attract and retain users, then we can look for larger angel investors so we can scale the app for hundreds of thousands, even millions, of users. At that point, we’d be able to work full-time maintaining the platform, supporting its communities and users, and adding features to bring a gift economy abundance mindset and lifestyle to the world. We won’t know how this app will be sustainably funded over time to keep it going beyond the build and the scaling phases until we get there, but we will be transparent about the processes involved and about those who join our team in bringing this platform forward.

Thank you so much for participating in the Buy Nothing Project social experiment. It is abundantly clear to us that gift economies work well for groups of people and we’re excited to launch into this next iteration of the project so we can more readily share wherever we are, equitably, and freely. We’re focusing our energy on building our BuyNothing app, so we’ll be answering all of your questions and soliciting your feedback via our forum at buynothing.live – Please join us there, as we won’t be able to answer comments here.
Rebecca Rockefeller & Liesl Clark
Co-Founders & Co-Volunteers
The Buy Nothing Project]]> A Brief History of the Buy Nothing Project, Complete with Controversies http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/1hsmrslur1-a-brief-history-of-the-buy-nothing-proje http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/1hsmrslur1-a-brief-history-of-the-buy-nothing-proje?amp=true Wed, 23 Dec 2020 01:28:00 +0300 BNP Founders We’ve invested over seven years of our hearts, souls, and minds into sparking the Buy Nothing Project, working towards our goal of fostering an international network of diverse, inclusive, and equitable local gift economies...

A Brief History of the Buy Nothing Project, Complete with Controversies

We’ve invested over seven years of our hearts, souls, and minds into sparking the Buy Nothing Project, working towards our goal of fostering an international network of diverse, inclusive, and equitable local gift economies in which people learn to trust in abundance and our shared desire to help each other through sharing. We are not an organization, a non-profit, a company, or any kind of legal entity. We are two friends who have volunteered our time alongside a humbling network of thousands of volunteers, and over a million participants, who carry our original ideas forward into their own communities to bring about change. We get daily reports from people around the world about the ways in which we are successfully working towards this mission, and also about all of the ways in which we fail and the ways in which this Project has harmed, and continues to harm, people and communities. We’re heartened by the happy stories, and we take the negative reports very seriously.

The “Give Where You Live”, One Group rule:
When we started this social experiment in our own community, an island in the Salish Sea off the coast of Seattle, we witnessed that community bonds grew tighter when members knew there was only one group for them, the one where they lived. We saw this commitment to a single group help people build trust within a group that was made up of their real-life neighbors, and we saw people begin to understand that Buy Nothing groups are more about connections and trust between people than about the fast and anonymous transfer of free stuff. Those were all positive outcomes.
But there were also negative outcomes and impacts of our one group rule. For instance, many modern neighborhood boundaries were originally mapped to establish and maintain a variety of injustices, including racism and socio-economic stratification. By relying on existing neighborhood maps, our Buy Nothing map began to align with unjust boundaries, including historic redlining, and this alignment amplified these injustices. We learned a lot and from the discovery that our good intentions were in fact having a damaging impact on diverse communities. So we pivoted as quickly as we could to train volunteers assisting people in establishing their group boundaries to suggest boundaries for groups that were as inclusive of all groups of people as possible and wouldn’t repeat historic lines of segregation ingrained within many communities, still.
There were other forms of damage, too. We saw some local group leaders use our original Give Where You Live rule to deny group access to people who were experiencing homelessness and those who have nontraditional or transient housing; to people who were in multiple groups to post on behalf of friends and family who wouldn’t otherwise be able to access a Buy Nothing group; to people who split their time each year between two or more communities, and want to participate in a Buy Nothing group everywhere they spend time; and to others whose circumstances didn’t line up with a rigid One Group Per Person rule. We now ask group leaders and all participants to find ways to break down and share across boundaries that separate and dehumanize; to find ways to build gift economies that are truly inclusive and diverse; and to make accommodations as necessary to include as many people as possible, where everyone can access the giving, receiving, and sharing. We ask everyone to participate in their Buy Nothing groups as fully as possible; to focus on building networks of interdependence; to focus on building trust, to make sharing as personal as possible.

Language and Accessibility:

In our idealism, striving to be the perfect local gift economy for our own community, we asked our members to try to not use abbreviations like “ISO” (in search of) when asking for an item or service they might need. We wanted to be unlike other free-stuff groups and have people use full sentences or tell stories with a few more words describing to their neighbors what they’re in search of and perhaps why. We love words and were enthralled by the funny pieces written by neighbors we were now getting to know. They were sharing small details about their lives, embedded in their asks, gives, and gratitude. Using more words than a want ad was not a requirement, just a suggestion. Many of our neighbors had no clue what ISO meant, so they felt excluded from the conversation when it was used. Our intention was also to create a community narrative, a dialogue beyond “ISO Sugar.”

We’ve learned, however, through feedback from many Buy Nothing participants, that our guideline was elitist and ableist and that using abbreviations is easiest for those who may be in a hurry, who have difficulty typing, who are developmentally challenged, who use digital readers because they’re visually impaired, or who may not speak the dominant language in the group but can navigate the language of Buy/Sell/Trade groups. And we learned some group leaders were removing members for using abbreviations and acronyms. We needed to walk that guideline back in hopes that each Buy Nothing group includes people with a variety of languages, literacy levels, and communication styles. Our guidelines now ask people to communicate in whatever way(s) are easiest for them, and to work at understanding and including each other even when communication comes in unexpected forms. Many group leaders are uncomfortable or angry with this change in our guidelines and have decided to edit their versions of our public copyright documents to return to what we see as problematic and damaging language. This is their right in our open source movement, just as it is our right to update the version of our document that we maintain and provide as a freely-given gift to the world when we learn that our own written rules and standards may be causing harm.

Open Source Model:

Due to the lessons noted above, and the fact that all Buy Nothing Project groups are locally managed with the local group leaders solely responsible for what happens in them, we realized our core mission was not to micromanage the groups themselves but to be an international resource, providing the free tools and training for people who want to set up and run their own gift economies. We removed ourselves from all of the local groups and took steps to flatten our own internal hierarchy within our volunteer infrastructure. In our original model, admins of local Buy Nothing Facebook groups were coached by Regional Team Members who were in turn supported and guided by a group of Global Team Members. Our volunteer corps was approaching 6000 (we’re now 10,000) and managing these teams was quickly becoming unsustainable, both in terms of efficient communication and because some people took it upon themselves to use our foundational documents to amplify racism and bigotries of many forms. We recognized our complicity in shoring up systemic racism and injustice and realized we must completely restructure in order to put local groups into the hands of local volunteer leaders who were better able to address the manifestations of injustice specific to their communities – because the Buy Nothing Project is international in scope, injustice takes many forms. There were also many local group leaders who felt “controlled” by Regional Team Members and therefore unable to make decisions in the best interest of the local Buy Nothing groups they knew so well.
As a first step, we removed the middle tier of our internal support structure, theRegional Team Members. At the same time, we created a new Mentor position in our Admin Hub, the online group we host of the 10,000+ Buy Nothing Project volunteers. We invited anyone who was interested in acting as a mentor to identify themselves, so that other volunteers could reach out for support. Mentors can connect with people seeking their guidance in our group, and we also encourage them to create independent support groups if they’d like. We provide a place for them to describe these groups and provide links for anyone who’s interested in joining them.Many former Regional Team Members continue to this day as mentors within our Admin Hub, answering questions and providing insight based on their valuable knowledge and experience. Removing the Regional Team Member role was not a popular move. The volunteers felt undermined, under valued, and dismissed.
As a next step, we updated our foundational writings, the very documents that are needed in each group, that include the rules and standards for participation. We put a public copyright Creative Commons license on each one, so that anyone is free to use these documents as-is or make edits and additions, for noncommercial use on any platform. These are dynamic documents that have grown from the first version we wrote for our own local group, and we provide them for free, as part of our gift economy mission, to anyone who would like to use them. There are some specifics about how each document can be turned into a “derivative work,” and these directions are available by clicking on the Creative Commons License link in the footer of each.
Without the internal hierarchy and with public copyright documents, each and every Buy Nothing Project group around the world became fully independent and empowered to serve its community, guided only by its local volunteer leaders. These volunteers can participate in our freely-given group leader training, they can come to our Admin Hub for support, they can work with a volunteer mentor, and they can join independent support groups run by those mentors, or any combination of these, or none of these. We view each and every Buy Nothing group around the world as an equally important and valuable facet of this collective experiment.
As a third step, we have dissolved the Global Team, so that each member can participate in this movement alongside every other volunteer, offering their wisdom, support, and suggestions to anyone who would like these gifts.
As in any coordinated project run entirely by volunteers, some decisions made will not be a good fit for everyone and we recognize that our original hierarchical infrastructure had many flaws and was not our best decision. We shifted, and we know that we’ll learn more about the flaws of our current model and will need to shift again in response. By removing the Regional and now Global roles, we are empowering everyone to speak as themselves, without titles, each of us taking responsibility for our own words and actions and on as equal a footing as possible.

Community Agreement:
When we started the Buy Nothing Project, we had a “Keep it Civil” rule backed up by a document called “the Civility Pledge” from a nonprofit devoted to fostering meaningful and respectful discourse online. We also asked people to use a “True, Kind, Necessary” litmus test when they decided how to speak to their fellow Buy Nothing group participants about difficult or emotional subjects.

We learned, less quickly than we should have, how the words “civility” and “kindness” were tools of white supremacy in the United States, used over and over again to silence people who spoke up about racism and other forms of bigotry as they manifested in Buy Nothing groups, most especially against Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). In the beginning, we asked people to take discussions about racism and bigotry elsewhere, as these didn’t fit into the rules we had written for what sort of posts belonged in Buy Nothing Groups. Between the language in our rules and our refusal to make space for these important discussions, much damage was done to BIPOC especially, and also to people from other historically marginalized groups. People were silenced, shamed, removed from groups, and made to feel unwelcome in their local Buy Nothing groups and also in the movement as a whole.

Thanks to the many people who spoke up, called us out and in, and invested their labor in us, we were able to see our own white fragility and internalized racism in new ways, and we were able to start to take responsibility for the damage we and our Project, were causing.
Buy Nothing Project groups, volunteers, and participants around the world are fortunate that the Equity Team was formed. This group of volunteers spent countless hours creating a new Community Agreement to replace our Code of Conduct (which itself had replaced the Civility Code, although the Code of Conduct still contained the word “civility”). We were incredibly lucky to benefit from their labor also in the form of help working through our other existing documents to identify language that was providing support for systemic injustice. When the Community Agreement was finished and posted online, we asked every Buy Nothing Project group to put it into practice, and we put it into place in each of our internal support groups, including the Admin Hub. While our open source model does not allow us to force any document on any Buy Nothing group, we have gone on the record before and will do it again here: We view the Equity Team’s Community Agreement as a key foundational document that should be used by all Buy Nothing Project groups who want to join this international movement.

We Wrote a Book:
One of the most common questions we get asked as co-founders is “How can I start a Buy Nothing group away from Facebook or offline completely?” followed by, “What else can I do?” Thanks to Atria Books of Simon & Schuster, we were lucky enough to write and publish a book that answers both of these questions. But it is also about our own life experiences, providing a template for anyone interested in sharing creatively to help reduce their waste and their overall footprint while making use of the abundance around them in the form of the commons, all the goods and services available for free through members of their own community. The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan: How to Buy Less, Share More, and Live Generously is our manifesto that includes a 7-step action plan to equip anyone with a road map to building a Buy Nothing life wherever they are. We are proud of our book, although we’d also love to re-write it again with everything we’ve learned since turning in our final manuscript, and we feature it prominently on our website. Believe us, we understand the irony of the title of our book and the fact that it is also available for sale. If you’d like to press us further on this, please read our ‘why‘. In the meantime, we hope you’ll check a copy out from your local library, or ask your neighbors if they have one you can borrow, or pick up a copy from your local independent bookseller to read and share with your community.

Gratitude Jar:
Running a project of this size and scope full time has cost us (in time, money, and our physical and mental health) and we do have ongoing expenses. We recognize that many Buy Nothing group leaders, too, cannot devote time due to economic reasons. And so we’ve introduced the “gratitude jar,” a chance for group leaders to post their Paypal or Venmo (for example) accounts in their group’s description. This is, of course, at each local group’s choice and control. Facebook provides tools for all group admins to solicit donations for their work. Each and every Buy Nothing Project group is “owned” and run solely by its local leaders, who are responsible to their own group and larger community. So this is just like any other decision, up to each individual group leadership team. We want to model ways to continue to provide this freely-given service to communities and the world while also using the tools provided to allow people to support their group’s leadership team, the same way that many freely-given movements and projects are finding their way to sustainability these days, both within the racial justice movement and in other spheres as well. We, too, will find a spot to put a Paypal or Venmo account up on this website so participants can help cover the yearly expenses we incur to keep this project going.

Periodic Updates:
All of our Buy Nothing Project documents are dynamic. We will continue to create new free resources (we call them Freesources) and to adapt our existing documents to be as international, equitable, and open as possible. We realize that some local group leaders may not agree with the changes we make, and so they will choose to stick with the old language. We hope each participant, however, whether a group leader or a member, will continue to check back here as we work to explain our reasoning behind why we continue to revise and clarify the rules, standards, guidelines, and commonly asked questions. We plan to use this blog, here, on this website to keep the entire Buy Nothing community informed.

Buy Nothing Project May Not Be a Good Fit For Everyone:
We know we are imperfect. We know that the Buy Nothing Project contains evidence of our imperfections and flawed humanity. Knowing this gives us extra passion for replacing the hierarchy and power structure with an open source model, and it keeps us working at our Freesources, to make things better as we learn more about where we are causing harm. We know the open source model isn’t a good fit for everyone. We ask everyone to take what they can use of the gifts we offer and build gift economies from what works to serve their own local communities. ]]> Buy Nothing Groups are Inclusive, Locally-Managed Gift Economies http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/349rbsvyk1-buy-nothing-groups-are-inclusive-locally http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/349rbsvyk1-buy-nothing-groups-are-inclusive-locally?amp=true Thu, 03 Dec 2020 01:30:00 +0300 BNP Founders My have we grown! At this date, early December, 2020, groups using the Buy Nothing name and resources are closing in on about 5,000, with 10,000 volunteers running them. Many of the Buy Nothing groups were started...

Buy Nothing Groups are Inclusive, Locally-Managed Gift Economies

My have we grown! At this date, early December, 2020, groups using the Buy Nothing name and resources are closing in on about 5,000, with 10,000 volunteers running them. Many of the Buy Nothing groups were started years ago following the original Buy Nothing Project protocol, in which members of the founding team did the busy work of creating new groups, adding original documents/files and images, etc. It was not our intention to play a leadership role in each of the groups, we were simply here to set things up and provide up-to-date documents.
Over the past 7 years, we’ve learned a lot about how to foster and support the development of local Buy Nothing gift economy groups, and we’ve made several important changes to our protocols. Among the things we’ve learned is that local Buy Nothing groups need to be locally managed, led by local volunteers who give their time and energy in service to their real-life neighbors and community. In order to realize this, we are actively removing ourselves from each and every group, handing full responsibility and control over to the current local leadership team.
Thanks to the labor and guidance of the Equity Team, each Buy Nothing Project group has access to the Equity Team’s Community Agreement that provides a framework for discussions that will help fulfill the Project’s mission to build inclusive, equitable gift economies in which each and every person from the community is welcomed and recognized as equal in humanity and importance to the whole. It is the expectation of the Buy Nothing Project founders that each Buy Nothing group will embrace this Community Agreement and welcome discussions about any or all of the ways in which people are marginalized within their groups, and about ways to create a more inclusive and equitable Buy Nothing gift economy culture.
Gift economies have been part of our global cultures since the earliest days of humanity. We have a long way still to go in pursuit of equity and full inclusion, and all of us on the founding team of the Buy Nothing Project hope your group will choose to carry on as part of the Buy Nothing Project network, bringing this mission to life for your own community.]]> Racial Justice & the Buy Nothing Project http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/judjdav7e1-racial-justice-amp-the-buy-nothing-proje http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/judjdav7e1-racial-justice-amp-the-buy-nothing-proje?amp=true Sat, 13 Jun 2020 07:00:00 +0300 BNP Founders We are co-founders and co-volunteers of the Buy Nothing Project, and we ask the entire worldwide Buy Nothing Project movement to join us in affirming that Black lives DO matter, and that it is important to confront...

Racial Justice & the Buy Nothing Project

Note: The following post was published to this website on 4 June, 2020, but hasn’t been visible via mobile. The additional statement below was published to the Buy Nothing Project’s public Facebook page on 7 June, 2020. We are republishing both statements as a blog post to make them easier to find, and this content will continue to live on its own dedicated page here.
June 4, 2020

An Open Letter Regarding Racial Justice & The Buy Nothing Project

We are co-founders and co-volunteers of the Buy Nothing Project, and we ask the entire worldwide Buy Nothing Project movement to join us in affirming that Black lives DO matter, and that it is important to confront racism and white supremacy everywhere, including within all Buy Nothing Project groups everywhere.
The Buy Nothing Project is present in over 30 countries, with approximately 1.5 million participants in neighborhood groups under local leadership, and we are an entirely volunteer-run movement. There is great diversity across this movement when it comes to the forms racism takes. Each group has the power to dive into its own history, boundaries, rules, and culture to improve and build a better, stronger, anti-racist gift economy.

It has been our Buy Nothing Project mission to build an international network of hyper-local gift economies where people can give, receive, and share freely, without strings attached or any expectation of reward except the joy of sharing, and where the real wealth being built is a more resilient, interconnected and interdependent community. This cannot truly happen until we address the poison of racism and start to develop an actively anti-racist culture.
The Buy Nothing Project has benefited greatly from the labor of the Equity Team, a group of admins and members who put together a new Community Agreement for each Buy Nothing Project group to use. We are excited to post this here to the Buy Nothing Project website as soon as possible. We are grateful to each Equity Team member for their labor, and for their dedication to the Buy Nothing Project movement despite the flaws and racism we as co-founders built into the original structure of this movement.
We hope that each Buy Nothing Project group will begin to ask and answer important questions. Below are a few that we’ve been working on as we attempt to improve the impact of the Buy Nothing Project. We hope you and your group will add more questions, share those with the worldwide Buy Nothing Project community, and seek answers:
– How can our group insure that all People of Color are safe when giving, receiving, and sharing?
– How can our group become a brave space for discussions about white supremacy and racism, and about how these show up in the giving, receiving, and sharing that happens here?

– Do our group’s boundaries follow old redlines or other official or unofficial segregation boundaries? If so, can we reconfigure our group to cross these lines to form a new sharing group neighborhood identity that doesn’t gentrify or disrespect existing neighborhood identities?

– Is this group safe and welcoming to People of Color, both as members and as admins? Does our group fully include all neighborhood members as participants and leaders, however individuals desire to participate?
– How can change to become a more sustainable, more equitable gift economy community?

– How can we address racism, inequity, and injustice through our giving, receiving, and sharing?
– How can we encourage people of privilege to take their responsibilities seriously, educating themselves, listening to the opinions and suggestions of People of Color and acting upon them?

We ask everyone to join us in this work. Start from where you are. If you are a person with white privilege, start to educate yourself, or continue to educate yourself. Be ready for some uncomfortable conversations, be ready to change, and do not give up. This is very important work that rests on those of us who benefit from systemic racism (all white people). If you are a Person of Color, know that this work does not rest on your shoulders- ask your Buy Nothing Project group for what you need and want in order to participate fully, safely, and with joy.

We have also assembled a beginning kit of Racial Justice Resources to aid each Buy Nothing Project group. It’s a public Google Doc that we hope is accessible to everyone. If there’s a more accessible format for your group, please let us know. If you have other resources to add, please let us know in a comment here, or in an email to thebuynothingproject@gmail.com. This document is not meant to absolve us or anyone from past harm, nor is it a complete list. We want to see it grow, to provide more resources to everyone participating in the Buy Nothing Project, so that each of us with work to do has access to educational tools to begin this process. Each Buy Nothing Project group has the opportunity to model how every neighborhood can become an actively anti-racist gift economy.

(We’ve put together a Bookshop with the book titles listed in the Racial Justice Resource, for ease of accessing them, if you’d like to support your local independent bookseller as well as the authors of the books.)

Onward.
Yours in sharing freely,
Liesl Clark & Rebecca Rockefeller
_____________________________________
Additional Public Statement from the Co-founders of the Buy Nothing Project:
7 June, 2020

In the beginning of the Buy Nothing Project, our white fragility and privilege so clouded our understanding and judgement that we asked people not to call other group members or items being offered racist. In fact, this white fragility and privilege is so deeply rooted in us that we didn’t even remember taking this stance until after releasing our statement above about racial justice in the Buy Nothing Project in June of 2020, almost seven years into this experiment, when a past participant took the time to remind us and call us out on our gaslighting and racism. We are grateful to her for her work to hold us accountable. She made it possible for us to see more clearly just how deeply entrenched racist norms are in us, even today, after daily personal work, education, and conversations about these issues over the past two years.

This makes us that much more dedicated to finding the other racist poison we have in ourselves, and the racism we have built into this project we have dedicated years of our lives to. We urge all white people to join us in this work, educating themselves, identifying their internalized racism, and working to actively dismantle systemic racism in their own projects and work as well as in society at large. We are not the only two white people who are racist – This is so much bigger than the Buy Nothing Project. Our work is to repair the harm we have caused here, and to dismantle the racist structures we have built.

Please, fellow white people, identify your own work and do it. Black, Indigenous, and People of Color are impacted every single day, in so many ways, they are suffering and dying, because of the racist system we white people each play an active role in perpetuating.

We would like to apologize to every single person our racism has hurt. We are working to do better. We have a long way to go, and we welcome your comments calling our attention to where we’ve done harm, where we can make repairs, and where there are racist structures and norms we can dismantle and eradicate within the Buy Nothing Project.

Sincerely,
Liesl Clark & Rebecca Rockefeller, co-founders & co-volunteers of the Buy Nothing Project]]> Mother’s Day Celebration: Freely-Given Community Cookbook http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/ce5uhaguk1-mothers-day-celebration-freely-given-com http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/ce5uhaguk1-mothers-day-celebration-freely-given-com?amp=true Mon, 11 May 2020 00:32:00 +0300 BNP Founders Family Comfort Food Recipes of Yore: A Quarantine Mother’s Day CelebrationWe are thrilled to share this freely-given crowd-sourced Buy Nothing community cookbook with the world in honor of ...

Mother’s Day Celebration: Freely-Given Community Cookbook

Family Comfort Food Recipes of Yore: A Quarantine Mother’s Day Celebration
We are thrilled to share this freely-given crowd-sourced Buy Nothing community cookbook with the world in honor of Mother’s Day in the US. Scroll down to access this Freesource filled with family favorites in both Google Doc and PDF formats.

On May 5th, we put out this call on our Facebook pages and timelines:

“Good day, all! Co-founders, Liesl Clark Rebecca Rockefeller, here. We are working on a labor of love, a Mothers Day free downloadable cookbook with recipes of yore, that comfort food our mothers, grandmothers, and great grandmothers were so good at cooking up. Liesl’s mother-in-law just passed away last week and Liesl’s family miss her deeply in these times. We’d love to share some of Doris’s recipes that were her way of taking care of everyone around her, the irresistible treats that kept grand children sneaking into her kitchen late at night to snitch delectables in secret. We are also inspired by a conversation we had in our forum with a member who shared her own family recipes collected over the years, which we’ll be sharing as part of this recipe book, too. We’d love to create this shareable resource for all, and if you’d like to contribute recipes from your family, and even stories or brief profiles of your mothers/grandmothers to go along with the recipes, we’ll include them in this freesource. It’s a celebration of comfort food in a time of quarantine and a chance to honor the thriftiness and kitchen smarts of our foremothers. You can send your contributions any way that’s easiest for you, a photo of a recipe can work, too. We will take your submission as permission to publish the recipe or photo in this Mothers Day freebook, with attribution to you and your loved one for your recipe. THANKS!”

And so many of you answered! We received 112 pages of recipes from Buy Nothingers around the world, many with sweet stories and memories attached. Thank you so much to everyone who shared a recipe!

We hope you enjoy reading and cooking your way through this collection, and we hope you’ll share it widely and freely. These days, we could all use some extra comfort and love.

With gratitude and love to all mothers of all kinds,

Liesl & Rebecca, co-founders and co-volunteers at the Buy Nothing Project, co-authors of The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan: Discover the Joy of Spending Less, Sharing More, and Living Generously.
Click here to get your copy of this Freesource in Google Doc form.

Click here to go to our personal website’s Freesources page where you can download a copy of this cookbook as a PDF. There is no login required to do this, and the PDF is freely-given.]]> Buy Nothing Project COVID-19 Statement http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/7ct92kdgd1-buy-nothing-project-covid-19-statement http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/7ct92kdgd1-buy-nothing-project-covid-19-statement?amp=true Tue, 17 Mar 2020 00:33:00 +0300 BNP Founders We know there are concerns about people sharing items, and possibly transmitting the virus to each other this way. We must all take this seriously. It is absolutely critical that everyone follow all public health directions and...

Buy Nothing Project COVID-19 Statement

FIRST THINGS FIRST: IT IS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY FOR EACH AND EVERY PARTICIPANT IN EVERY LOCAL BUY NOTHING GIFT ECONOMY GROUP TO RESPECT THE LAW, ALL PUBLIC HEALTH ORDERS, AND COMMON SENSE TO PROTECT THEMSELVES AND THE COMMON GOOD.
We know there are concerns about people sharing items, and possibly transmitting the virus to each other this way. We must all take this seriously. It is absolutely critical that everyone follow all public health directions and recommendations regarding how to treat objects. It appears that this novel coronavirus can live for hours or days on all sorts of surfaces, from our car keys and cell phones to groceries and gifts. It seems a matter of common sense that we should each focus now on being mindful about what we bring into our homes, and on treating all objects that enter our homes with informed care.
A growing number of people around the world are under local, state/provincial, or national orders to STAY HOME, and are only allowed to leave for essential reasons. Each such order MUST be followed. ALL ACTIVITIES in Buy Nothing Project groups, as in every other group of any type, MUST BE LEGAL. Emergency orders are being issued and are changing quickly, and EVERYONE MUST ADJUST THEIR ACTIONS IN ACCORDANCE WITH THESE ORDERS.
If you are unhappy with anything happening in your local Buy Nothing Project group, you must bring your concerns directly to the only people who can take action: the volunteer admins of your local group.
The Buy Nothing Project is a movement of locally-managed gift economy groups; each local group is an independent Facebook group, managed by local volunteers. Only a group’s local volunteers have the power to make decisions or take action to guide their group. The Buy Nothing Project founders have no control over what happens in each local group around the world, but we continue to implore everyone to follow all laws and public health orders, to adhere to all public health suggestions and directions, to take responsibility for giving, receiving, and sharing safely (when sharing is legal and allowed at all), and to remember that we each participate at our own risk.
We must each take responsibility to seek out the most current information from reliable sources such as the World Health Organization, national experts such as the CDC and Dr Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the US, and all local public health officials. We must each put this information into practice to protect others as well as ourselves.

This pandemic is growing and changing rapidly, and none of us know yet how long we will be advised to follow social distancing, social isolation, or quarantine orders. It is likely that most of us will need supplies from outside our homes at some point. All objects that come from outside our homes, whether they’re arriving in packages, are picked up from grocery stores or pharmacies, or are given as gifts between neighbors, need to be treated with the same care and diligence.

We are in a situation in which we can pose a danger to each other and also be each others’ saving grace. We ask everyone to combine respect for the law and public health orders, the best scientific knowledge available to stop transmission of this virus, and compassionate action to help each other safely.
We know how important it is for us to stay connected to each other, to look out for each other, in as many safe ways as possible. Even when it is unwise or illegal to give items to each other, there are many other ways we can help each other that do not involve the movement of items from one person to another. For instance, there are many gifts of self that we can offer to each other that require no disinfectant: the gift of checking in each day via social media/text/phone/video chat; the gifts of communication and company, education and entertainment delivered along these same paths. We encourage local Buy Nothing Project groups to explore this sort of safe sharing during these troubled times.

In short: FOLLOW THE LAW AND ALL PUBLIC HEALTH ORDERS. BE SAFE. BE CAREFUL. BE COMPASSIONATE. BE INFORMED. We are in this together and must find a way to help each other through this safely.
– Liesl Clark & Rebecca Rockefeller, co-founders and co-volunteers at the Buy Nothing Project
updated 22 March 2020]]> Buy Nothing Project Research Initiative http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/3b6hoh9jd1-buy-nothing-project-research-initiative http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/3b6hoh9jd1-buy-nothing-project-research-initiative?amp=true Wed, 21 Oct 2020 00:36:00 +0300 BNP Founders Buy Nothing Project co-founders’ note: When we set up our first Buy Nothing Project group over 6 years ago, one of the first criticisms directed at us was that a hyperlocal gift economy would destroy...

Buy Nothing Project Research Initiative

By Alisa Pearlstone
Buy Nothing Project co-founders’ note: When we set up our first Buy Nothing Project group over 6 years ago, one of the first criticisms directed at us was that a hyperlocal gift economy would destroy local businesses and non-profits and thereby bring hardship to local families. Some feared that money saved thanks to gifts received would mean no more money spent locally. We hypothesized that the opposite would happen, that bringing neighbors together to share resources freely would strengthen our local community, and likely facilitate more mindful local spending. Because this criticism still arises when new Buy Nothing Project groups are launched in new places, we chose to use our first survey to pose a question that addresses this: are Buy Nothing Project participants saving money, and if they are, what are they doing with that extra cash?
— Liesl Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller

SUMMARY OF DATA FROM OUR FIRST SURVEY AND PRELIMINARY RESEARCH TOOL

KEY MESSAGES:
Being in a Buy Nothing group helps people improve their financial well-being. Monthly savings are helping members to better afford essentials as well as spending money more freely in local businesses.

RESEARCH SUMMARY FOR BUY NOTHING ADMINS AND MEMBERS:
Results from a survey of over 2000 Buy Nothing members show that participating in the gift economy through the Buy Nothing Project enables the vast majority of members to save money each month. Nine out of every ten members tell us they have extra money in the bank that is now primarily going further to meet their needs, being spent on essentials for their family and affording their bills more comfortably.

Excitingly, local businesses were the second biggest beneficiary from our gifting communities’ improved finances, with local spending being the second most popular way for our members to allocate their healthier bank balance. This adds weight to our belief that, far from being a threat to the local market economy, local business can indeed benefit from being in an area that has a hyperlocal gift economy within.

While 90% of respondents had saved at least some money each month, over a third had saved more than $20 and 15% had saved over $50, with some people routinely saving money in the $100s.

There is so much more to learn about how participating in the gift economy is changing communities. This survey has scratched the surface but we will be following this preliminary work with a series of research pieces in the coming year. This process will help us to really tell the story of Buying Nothing to the rest of the world so that we can transform even more communities that we have yet to reach. Importantly, it will also help us to improve what we are doing with our existing communities by giving us vital insights.

Thanks to all who participated and for your ongoing support and a big thank you in advance for helping us with the surveys yet to come.]]> Person 2 Person 4 Relief http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/4ghk23b0a1-person-2-person-4-relief http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/4ghk23b0a1-person-2-person-4-relief?amp=true Fri, 19 Oct 2018 00:37:00 +0300 BNP Founders Person2Person4Relief is a team of volunteers around the world, all working to get supplies to those affected by local natural disasters. Please join us! In the past we’ve provided much-needed relief to the blank spots on the media map...

Person 2 Person 4 Relief

Person2Person4Relief is a team of volunteers around the world, all working to get supplies to those affected by local natural disasters. Please join us! In the past we’ve provided much-needed relief to the blank spots on the media map, the forgotten corners of North Carolina during Hurricane Florence, Texas during Hurricane Harvey, to Puerto Rico during Maria and to Nepal where millions of people, due to the earthquake there were rendered homeless. We’re a close-knit team of professionals, members of The Buy Nothing Project, relief workers, and everyday citizens who want to help those in need affected by disasters, so we’re doing what we can as efficiently as possible through our collective contacts, person-to-person, in gift economy style and also through the local groups of The Buy Nothing Project, to bring relief where relief is needed.
The group can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1075687045792546/]]> Just Start The Giving http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/ctku1cb9d1-just-start-the-giving http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/ctku1cb9d1-just-start-the-giving?amp=true Tue, 06 Jan 2015 01:39:00 +0300 BNP Founders Giving is complicated. There’s a growing perception among many of us that only the “haves” can give, only those who have excess or more than enough can contribute. No one would want what the “have nots”...

Just Start The Giving

Giving is complicated. There’s a growing perception among many of us that only the “haves” can give, only those who have excess or more than enough can contribute. No one would want what the “have nots” could offer.
Wrong.
At The Buy Nothing Project, we’re a collection of local gift economies that have popped up all over the United Sates. We have groups from Galveston, TX to Amherst, MA and Upper Kittitas, WA to the Upper Keys, FL. And there’s one fundamental truth that underscores each gift economy: Giving begets more giving. Think of it as a cup of yogurt. For that yogurt to exist, you need a tiny bit of starter yogurt to make the next batch. Like yogurt, giving economies need a tablespoonful of starter giving to sustain more giving.

What strikes me is the similarities I see in the growth of each Buy Nothing gift economy. First people sign up quickly, wooed by the idea of joining a local giving circle where items and talents are offered for free and anyone is welcome to ask for what they need. It’s a utopic alternative to the market economy. There’s no judgment involved, just a celebration of the bounty around us, and it’s all free. But then, at the early stages of a startup gift economy, there’s a lull in the giving. At first it doesn’t even happen at all. People are, indeed, afraid to give, thinking they couldn’t possibly have anything that anyone would want. This is the crux of the problem of a stalled-out gift economy.
Stalled out? Why? People often think they have nothing to offer their community, perhaps they are struggling to make ends meet. Some members of the group might start things off by asking for items they need in an “ISO baby clothes”- type post. There’s no information about who you are or a story or picture of your baby, and the ask feels anonymous and, well, inhuman. People retreat into skepticism of whether a giving economy could truly work. It’s too good to be true. There’s too little out there and therefore not enough for me. This is the modern sickness of scarcity-thinking which is blind to the abundance in us all.
How do we kickstart a gift economy and overcome our fear of giving? We need to see ourselves as sources of bounty, whether it’s a story you can offer a group of elderly people or a cup of sugar to your next door neighbor, just start the giving. Even the poorest neighborhoods in our country have bounty to give. I’ve been stunned countless times by the generosity of people who are subsistence farmers in Nepal, who invite my family into their homes and offer us endless cups of tea, sweets, cookies, the best of what they have in their kitchens as a gift of pure generosity, celebrating our connection as humans. In a gift economy we can do the same, offer the members of our village a little of what we can spare, to spread the good will of our connectedness which spurs our neighbors to do the same.

Everyone Has Bounty To Give

“I’d be happy to receive a wheelbarrow-load of dandelions,” my friend Rebecca declared. That was when it struck me: People are afraid to give because they believe they don’t have anything to offer, we lost our belief that we’re connected to each other and are needed by our neighbors. What if we started our Buy Nothing giving groups by asking for things that we know anyone can contribute? A bagful of dandelions would be gold for my chickens, but my neighbors don’t know this.
A tattered old book can be a DIY project for a craftsperson.
A box of old Christmas cards could be this year’s wreath for a creative spirit.

Shredded paper could be bedding in my henhouse.

Broken ceramic dishes are coveted art materials for a ceramicist who makes mosaics:

A box of unwanted little plastic toys and stickers can be rewards for good reading in a teacher’s classroom.
The things you take for granted are what your neighbors would love. Those are the gifts that are the soul of a gift economy, the items you see everyday that someone on the other side of your town can put to use in new ways.
The bay leaves on the tree in your back yard, the corks from your bottles of wine:

Your clean odd socks can be treat bags for another person’s kids in the bulk department:

The flannel from a torn or stained set of sheets are material for a seamstress’s creation:

Your old wedding dress could become a young girl’s dream dress:

Your old fishing lures and the stories that go with them could make a boy’s dreams of fishing come true.
The ability you have to paint faces can make a group of children happy:

A gift economy requires a shift in consciousness where we see ourselves not as individuals but as connected selves where we understand that together we have our things, our talents, even our ideas to give to our community. Each week we all can contribute in ways that make a difference to everyone else and therefore ourselves because gifts create bonds between people, and when the whole community witnesses the gift-giving in their Buy Nothing groups the community is strengthened. I believe, no matter what your socio-economic situation, the bounty is there, hiding in plain sight. But we can’t benefit from it if we don’t ask for it or see the beauty in each gift we can offer to start rebuilding our connectedness to each other — And this great shift in consciousness, the search for the sweetness in our communities, the utopic ideal of a giving economy, can’t happen until we just start the giving.]]> An Introduction to The Buy Nothing Project http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/gymvvb9z61-an-introduction-to-the-buy-nothing-proje http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/gymvvb9z61-an-introduction-to-the-buy-nothing-proje?amp=true Tue, 03 Feb 2015 01:41:00 +0300 BNP Founders We offer people a way to give and receive, share, lend, and express gratitude through a worldwide network of hyper-local gift economies in which the true wealth is the web of connections formed between people who are real-life neighbors....

An Introduction to The Buy Nothing Project

Our Buy Nothing Project Mission:
We offer people a way to give and receive, share, lend, and express gratitude through a worldwide network of hyper-local gift economies in which the true wealth is the web of connections formed between people who are real-life neighbors.
Principles:

We believe our hyper-local groups strengthen the social fabric of their communities, and ensure the health and vitality of each member.
We come from a place of abundance ~ not scarcity.
We believe in abundance, we give, we ask, we share, we lend and we express gratitude.
We are a gift economy, not a charity. We see no difference between want and need, waste and treasure.
We measure wealth by the personal connections made and trust between people.
We value people and their stories and narratives above the ‘stuff.’
We are inclusive and civil at our core.
We value transparency and honesty in all our interactions.
We view all gifts as equal; the human connection is the value.
We believe every community has the same wealth of generosity and abundance.

Join Us:
Buy Nothing: Give Freely. Share creatively. Post anything you’d like to give away, lend, or share among neighbors. Ask for anything you’d like to receive for free or borrow. Keep it legal. Keep it civil. No buying or selling, no trades or bartering, no soliciting for cash. We’re an adult-only, hyper-local gift economy. We are not a charity or community bulletin board.
By joining a Buy Nothing Project group, you agree to abide by our Mission and Rules.
You can join one group only, the group where you live so you can literally “give where you live.” This is what builds community.
Brought to you by The Buy Nothing Project. Looking for a group near you? Visit our Find a Group page. Want to join the Buy Nothing Project network and there’s no group in your area? Visit our Start a Group page to learn about how we set groups up.
© 2015 Liesl Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller
All Rights Reserved]]> BuyNothing Product Update #1 http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/9me9mbkj41-buynothing-product-update-1 http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/9me9mbkj41-buynothing-product-update-1?amp=true Sat, 16 Oct 2021 00:50:00 +0300 BNP Founders Welcome to the first BuyNothing App Product Update announcement! My name is Lucas Rix, and I’m BuyNothing’s head of product. You are receiving this email because you signed up on our waitlist. I’ll be sending out periodic ...

BuyNothing Product Update #1

Welcome to the first BuyNothing App Product Update announcement! My name is Lucas Rix, and I’m BuyNothing’s head of product. You are receiving this email because you signed up on our waitlist. I’ll be sending out periodic updates to keep everyone in the loop about the App - what's new, what's coming, and other news.

Our BuyNothing community is truly unique in its commitment to and pride in local communities. I’m excited for this next phase, and looking forward to realizing the vision of our new platform together! Feel free to email me with any questions or suggestions.

In this update:

Beta Launch Update
New Features Just Released
What’s Coming Next

With gratitude,

Lucas

++++++

Beta Update

THANK YOU

to all of the beta communities in Canada, Australia, and the US! As we near the end of our beta phase and approach our coming global release (to everyone, everywhere), we want to give a huge THANK YOU to the Guides and users that have been contributing to and promoting the app within your communities over the last six months. Your support and feedback has been invaluable to the build out of the app. Stay tuned for more updates on our global release.

New Version Just Released

The newest version of the app (live on the App Store as of Oct 14) includes some exciting new features and improvements. If you haven’t yet, update your app to get the new features:

New Feature: Sign In with Email

Finally!!! For those that prefer not to use social sign in with Google, Apple, and Facebook, now you can create an account with your email.

New Feature: Replies and Love

You can now post threaded replies to other people’s comments, allowing for more natural dialog in the post comments.

Sometimes we might not have anything to add in the way of words, but we do want to acknowledge, encourage, or “love” a neighbor’s comment or post. We can now ‘heart’ posts and individual comments!

New Feature: Change your Location and Sharing Area

This was a big one, and it really gets to the heart of why we’ve created our own platform: Removing Hard Boundaries!! By removing the physical boundaries of each BuyNothing community, we will now have the freedom and flexibility to decide how and where we want to gift and share with those around us. This new feature puts YOU at the center of your sharing community. Each user can decide to share HYPERLOCAL with others very close by or to share more broadly with people a little further down the street. We’ve also made relocating as easy as a few taps. Recently moved? Or need to help a parent gift items? No problem.

Next Up: Search and Tagging

Search: “Why can’t I search for something in the app?”
Results: We’ve heard you! And search is coming! We are currently in design and are user testing some approaches to make sure we get it right and you can search for people and posts, quickly and easily.

“@lucas, when can we tag users?!"
This is an important feature and a priority for our team. We’re working on it.

In Other News: Redesign of BNP.org!

We are working on a redesign of the buynothingproject.org site. It's going to be amazing. All the same content, tools, and resources, but in a new design that makes it easier to use them!

Thanks for reading! Let us know how we can make BuyNothing (and this newsletter!) better. And, remember, you can always share feedback in-app or by emailing me.

]]> Do we have to choose between the App and FB? http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/9lf44o8cx1-do-we-have-to-choose-between-the-app-and http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/9lf44o8cx1-do-we-have-to-choose-between-the-app-and?amp=true Wed, 10 Nov 2021 19:02:00 +0300 BNP Founders We've gotten this question more than once;), so we thought we'd just insert it here. Perhaps you have the same question...

Do we have to choose between the App and FB?

We've gotten this question more than once;), so we thought we'd just insert it here. Perhaps you have the same question (Thanks, LaTonya)!

QUESTION: Will groups have a choice to remain on Facebook? Is there an option to have both (more work) but some members don’t feel capable or wanting to change.

RESPONSE: All Buy Nothing groups, no matter what platform they are on, are welcome to stay wherever they are. We, as the project, are not in the Facebook groups, we do not have control over them. FB Admins and group members can participate in this project any way they’d like! People can be in both the app and in a Buy Nothing Facebook group. It’s all good! All sharing is welcome, no matter where it is.

The mission of the Buy Nothing project has always been to make our network of Buy Nothing gift economies as inclusive and accessible as possible. Regarding our new platform, and the new BuyNothing mobile app, please understand that we have learned that so many people are not able to participate in this project because they are not on FB. There are also a growing number of people who are only on FB due to Buy Nothing. They have asked us to create something new.

FB Admins are welcome to register in the app as a Community Builders. Read more about Community Builders here. In terms of work load, we believe you'll find the 'work' in the app is a light lift. Our hope is that Community Builders will continue all of the wonderful community building work to preserve the Buy Nothing ethos and guidelines in the app, and be happy that they no longer need to administer signups and deal with sprouting! If you are a FB Admin, head over to our special page and register as a Community Builder to get recognized in the app. You will also find on that page details around why we built the new platform to be inclusive of everyone, on and off Facebook.

So in summary, share where you want to! The abundance mindset can challenge our scarcity thinking to help us see that there’s plenty for us to share, wherever we are, no matter what venue we use to share. Of course, we hope you’ll join this next chapter of the Buy Nothing experiment with us on our independent app, following our independent spirit, and helping us to build something special for the world that’s uniquely suited for us all.

Kindest regards,
-founders]]> Buy Nothing Holiday Challenge http://buynothingproject.org/holidaychallenge Mon, 15 Nov 2021 23:16:00 +0300 BNP Founders Rethink buying your gifts this holiday.Instead, GIVE and ASK from others in your local community. It works!

Buy Nothing Holiday Challenge

Rethink buying your gifts this holiday.
Instead, GIVE and ASK from others in your local community. It works!]]> Product Update 2022.02.09 http://buynothingproject.org/blog/20220209 Wed, 09 Feb 2022 19:19:00 +0300 BNP Founders New features in our latest app release 1.4 launched in app stores 9/7/2022

Product Update 2022.02.09

New features in our latest app release 1.4 launched in app stores 9/7/2022]]> Privacy Policy Update 2022.03.02 http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/20e260ugx1-privacy-policy-update-20220302 http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/20e260ugx1-privacy-policy-update-20220302?amp=true Wed, 02 Mar 2022 19:00:00 +0300 BNP Founders

Privacy Policy Update 2022.03.02

Dear Buy Nothing Community:

We’re excited to share with you our new and improved Privacy Policy!

We’re working everyday to be a benefit company worthy of your trust, because trust is what fuels gift economies. We are passionate about building beautiful and enjoyable app experiences to connect each of us through the power of sharing, we’re passionate in our pursuit to build our core values into every facet of what we offer the world.. Our commitment to your personal data privacy is central to the Buy Nothing Project

We believe that any business model based on selling your personal data to third-parties is fundamentally at odds with our mission of building a connected and trusting global network of shared abundance. So, we commit to never selling your personal data. It is not, nor will it ever be, a part of our business model.

We’ve done our best to write plainly (no legalese), because we truly want you to understand the commitments we’re making to you. It’s important to us, and we know it’s important to you. A lot of time, effort and consideration was devoted to designing this new policy. That said, like the Buy Nothing Project itself we consider it an evolving project.

As always, we’re listening to you, and will continue to do our best to make our operating policies and business practices reflect the very best of the Buy Nothing spirit.

-The Buy Nothing Project Team

]]> How to Give or Receive Buy Nothing Aid http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/a2mzkkpyp1-how-to-give-or-receive-buy-nothing-aid http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/a2mzkkpyp1-how-to-give-or-receive-buy-nothing-aid?amp=true Sun, 20 Mar 2022 18:33:00 +0300 BNP Founders

How to Give or Receive Buy Nothing Aid

Over the past 8 years we have mobilized on many fronts to provide person-to-person relief through the Buy Nothing network. To give you some ideas for how you might utilize resources within the Buy Nothing Project to either receive or give humanitarian aid, we've built a toolkit for you. Local gift economies are uniquely positioned to provide aid all over the world. It's one thing we know we can do well as we've had lots of experience providing direct relief from disasters like earthquakes, landslides, hurricanes, wildfires, and wartime conflict. Here's how you, too, can participate: https://buynothingproject.org/aid]]> BuyNothing App Version History http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/0z1u0kdhp1-buynothing-app-version-history http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/0z1u0kdhp1-buynothing-app-version-history?amp=true Fri, 22 Apr 2022 05:39:00 +0300 BNP Founders

BuyNothing App Version History

We thought it time to give a comprehensive overview of our various point releases for the app. First and foremost, we just released Version 1.6 of the app this week. If you haven’t already, please download the update here, now. Thank you to all of you who have taken time to join the free BuyNothing app at some point during the last five months. We are grateful to have more than 335,000 of you across 192 countries and more than 10,500 cities with us, sharing and connecting in the app.

Since releasing Version 1.0 of the app on November 26, 2021, we’ve released 15 updated versions of the app (please see the table below).

We’ve noticed that many of you haven’t updated your version of the app since the very beginning, which means you’re missing out on a LOT of functionality! The app now includes many new features that weren’t included in earlier versions (search, a community page, community impact stats, personal user activity, grid view for posts, and much more). You’re missing out if you haven’t updated yet!

We released Version 1.6 of the app this week. If you haven’t already, please download the update now (quick update tutorial: go to the app store/play store, search for “BuyNothing app” then click “update”).

Version 1.6 is our best, cleanest, and most responsive build yet. It addresses all of the major bugs the community has reported over the course of the past few weeks (including account activation, log-in and erroneous post-like counts). The app is humming along now. And, as always, we’re eager for your feedback so the next iteration can be even better.

Our team is planning a lot of fantastic features to delight you in the coming months, so please stay tuned. In the meantime, please enjoy building your Buy Nothing life via our free and independent app!

Version History

1.6
11 Apr 2022
This release includes a login bug fix and other improvements.
1.5.1
1 Mar 2022
This release includes bug fixes and performance improvements
1.5
17 Feb 2022
This release includes:
- Search Posts
- New Grid View of Posts
- Squashed Bugs and Performance Improvements
1.4
7 Feb 2022
- New Activity Screen
- New Home Feed Design
- Bug Fixes and Performance Improvements
1.3.2
12 Jan 2022
This release includes bug fixes and performance improvements
1.3.1
3 Jan 2022
This release includes bug fixes and performance improvements
1.3
20 Dec 2021
- New Community Screen
- Add Photos to Comments/Messages
- Allow Block User from Profile
- Highlight Community Builders
- Squashed Bugs, including the Feed Refresh Issue
- Performance Improvements
- Expand Community Settings (Radius) Options
more
1.2.3
6 Dec 2021
This release includes bug fixes and performance improvements.
1.2.2
22 Nov 2021
This release includes bug fixes and performance improvements.
1.2.1
14 Oct 2021
This release includes bug fixes and performance improvements.
1.2
5 Oct 2021
We’re always making changes and improvements to BuyNothing. To make sure you don’t miss a thing, just keep your Updates turned on.
Bug fixes and improvements in this version include:
Fixed stability and performance issues
- Improved Notifications
- New Email Signup
- Threaded Replies
- Like Posts and Comments
- Change Location and Sharing Area
Happy sharing!
more
1.1.1
12 Aug 2021
The latest version contains bug fixes, performance improvements, and new features to make sharing and connecting easier!
1.1
4 Aug 2021
The latest version contains bug fixes, performance improvements, and new features to make sharing and connecting easier!
1.0.2
2 Jul 2021
- Zoom for pictures
- Bug fixes
1.0.1
16 Jun 2021
This release fixes a few small bugs.
1.0
2 Jun 2021

]]> Happy Earth Day and Launch of The Buy Nothing Home! http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/oteyculn71-happy-earth-day-and-launch-of-the-buy-no http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/oteyculn71-happy-earth-day-and-launch-of-the-buy-no?amp=true Fri, 22 Apr 2022 23:35:00 +0300 BNP Founders

Happy Earth Day and Launch of The Buy Nothing Home!

Dear Community,

Happy Earth Month to everyone!

Here’s what this email is all about:

Our ask for your Earth Day contribution to help keep Buy Nothing growing.
Our gift to you: The new Buy Nothing Home!
New app feature update.

Thank you for coming along on the ride with us as we build out the BuyNothing platform together with you in public. It continues to be our joy to design, build and expand the resources that we offer the world as a Buy Nothing gift, to nourish this global movement. At last count, there are over 7,000 Buy Nothing communities, 350,000 individual downloads of our app, and approximately 6 million participants in at least 120 countries.

If Buy Nothing has added anything good to your life, we are asking for your financial support so we can continue to build this movement, improve our platform, add features to our app, and inspire millions more people to join us all. We have monthly server costs to cover, a list of features we’d like to add, and more freely-given resources we’d like to create for everyone to use on every platform. No contribution is too small or too big. Thank you SO much to those of you have contributed, both one time and on a recurring basis. You are making this possible and we are grateful for your help.

As an Earth Day gift to you, we’re excited to invite you to our Buy Nothing Home. This is a collection of our personal tips and ideas to inspire you to live the BuyNothing life - And we hope you’ll add to the mix by sharing your own ideas and photos online, using #buynothinghome so we can find your posts and share them with the world, too.

BuyNothing app update: The app now includes many new features that weren’t included in earlier versions (search, a community page, community impact stats, personal user activity, grid view for posts, and much more). You’re missing out if you haven’t updated yet! Quick update tutorial: go to the app store/play store, search for “BuyNothing app” then click “update.”
If you’d like a fully detailed rundown of all of our app updates, please see this blog post.

We’re proud to have a free and independent app that makes Buy Nothing instantly accessible to everyone who’d like a mobile platform, custom-built for their Buy Nothing life. We’re also proud that the presence of Buy Nothing on other platforms continues to grow, guided by our freely-given resources. Together, the impact we’re having on the earth matters. Every hour of the day, between the northern and southern hemispheres of our lovely planet, people are:

Keeping items in use through giving and receiving,
Sharing items through lending and borrowing,
Expressing gratitude,
Offering inspiration and suggestions to help others reduce-reuse-rethink,
Building person-to-person connections

And all of this is diverting goods from our landfills and incinerators, building trust in our shared abundance, making it cool to reuse instead of buying new, and building a Buy-Nothing-New habit in millions of people. And we can do even more! Your financial support of our bootstrap operation will make it possible for us to continue this work. We’ve volunteered full-time for almost 10 years now and are looking forward to the next decade with your help.

Many thanks,
Liesl, Lucas, Rebecca & Tunji
The Buy Nothing Project Team

]]> College Move-Out, BuyNothing style! http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/vjffpo8ea1-college-move-out-buynothing-style http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/vjffpo8ea1-college-move-out-buynothing-style?amp=true Tue, 03 May 2022 00:47:00 +0300 BNP Founders

College Move-Out, BuyNothing style!

A few weeks ago, I connected with Kiley, a Stonehill College student in Professor Mooney’s Honors Environmental Ethics class. The class has taken on an exciting project: calling on Stonehill College to join their Buy Nothing community in time for their upcoming annual summer move-out from the dorms.

We’re so inspired by what the Stonehill Honors Environmental Ethics class is up to, we’re working on a Buy Nothing College Resource Kit - Watch our site and social media so you can download a kit for your college! College campuses are ready-made Buy Nothing communities waiting to connect, and we’d like to make that as easy as possible. We’re grateful to Stonehill College for taking the initiative to bring this to life on their campus, and for offering their lessons to the world. To take immediate action, you can find their Buy Nothing video tutorial on Instagram and adapt this to your own campus. https://www.instagram.com/tv/CcBgr91FpXt/?hl=en

Kiley was kind enough to join me for a Zoom chat this past Saturday, so I could ask some questions about what the Stonehill Skyhawks are up to. The Buy Nothing college move-out movement they’re starting can be joined by any college or university, and they’re kindly allowing us to share their posts here so that everyone else can learn from them and replicate this idea to build Buy Nothing circular gift economies that keep dorm room goods out of the trash and in use for full lives.

During my chat with Kiley, I learned a few basics about the impact of dorm move-out weeks at Stonehill.

Some of the most common items to end up in the trash are:
- Twin XL Bedding (sheets, mattress covers, duvets and comforters, etc): These seem to come especially from seniors who are moving onto post-college life, where Twin XL mattresses are extremely hard to find.
- Mirrors, especially the full-length style
- Rugs, Rugs, Rugs!
- Clothing

Stonehill will have some textile recycling bins available for students to use to send their clothing and bedding onto another life. But reuse is *always* a better next life for goods than recycling: The more we keep items in use as they are, the more we reap the benefits of the water, power, and human energy put into them, and the more we lessen their carbon, water, power, and plastic footprint.

Follow Buy Nothing Stonehill on Instagram to get all of their updates - whether you’re a Skyhawk or not, their content is very helpful and illuminating, and will help you bring this to life with your own college. https://www.instagram.com/buynothingstonehill/?hl=en

We’re so excited to have college campus communities joining Buy Nothing! Please let us know what resources we can develop to empower you to build sustainable Buy Nothing circular gift economies on your campus.
Yours in Buying Nothing New,
Rebecca Rockefeller, Buy Nothing Project co-founder

Here’s information from the Stonehill Environmental Ethics class, shared with permission:

https://www.instagram.com/buynothingstonehill/

Professor Mooney's Honors Environmental Ethics class is striving to create a lively and engaging Buy Nothing Community at Stonehill College. If you have specific questions about the project, please DM our instagram, or leave a comment on a post. We will get back to you as soon as we can! Thank you for participating and helping us reduce waste on Stonehill's campus!

-- Rebecca Rockefeller

]]> Buy Nothing Needs Your Help! http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/bc4sjj5901-buy-nothing-needs-your-help http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/bc4sjj5901-buy-nothing-needs-your-help?amp=true Wed, 26 Oct 2022 00:09:00 +0300 BNP Founders

Buy Nothing Needs Your Help!

We're launching our year-end fundraising campaign. If you'd rather not hear these pleas from us, contribute now and we'll be able to move onto other topics!

Please contribute a few dollars to keep us running and free. We’re growing so our server costs are soaring. Go to www.buynothingproject.org and click the handy pop-up to contribute today.

Your contributions go straight to direct expenses. We have zero payroll as we all volunteer, but we do need to pay to keep all of our resources online, freely-available and fully-operations. If each of us contributed even a little, we could cover BN costs for years!

Thank you for keeping this movement alive!

Please GIVE today, we’re counting on you.

(and we’ll add our orange Buy Nothing Supporter heart to your profile in return, so everyone can recognize your support)

Thank you,
the Buy Nothing Project Team

]]> Happy Birthday BuyNothing! http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/mpccs1apj1-happy-birthday-buynothing http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/mpccs1apj1-happy-birthday-buynothing?amp=true Wed, 23 Nov 2022 00:02:00 +0300 BNP Founders

Happy Birthday BuyNothing!

What a year it's been! Buy Nothing Day is the day we launched the BuyNothing app, in 2021, and the BuyNothing app is now 1 year old!

Thank you to everyone who has downloaded the app and is participating on our platform, all 610K of you.

Our growth is phenomenal.

Each day, we're averaging 1,200 downloads per day and now we have assembled a stellar team of expert developers, designers, marketing and research team who are volunteering their time to help us develop and design new features and stay on top of bugs in the app. Thank you so much, Sarah, Joel, Alexandra, Niina, and Alex!

If your community isn't hopping yet, get in the app and invite 10 of your friends to join in the Giving and Asking. There's nothing better than a vibrant gift economy in your neighborhood. Click here to visit our Build page that's full of resources for you to start building community in the app! ]]> Book a Virtual Meeting With Us! http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/ts1u0gg001-book-a-virtual-meeting-with-us http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/ts1u0gg001-book-a-virtual-meeting-with-us?amp=true Fri, 25 Nov 2022 15:32:00 +0300 BNP Founders

Book a Virtual Meeting With Us!

Happy BuyNothing Day! Liesl and Rebecca here. We’re celebrating our 1-year anniversary of the launch of the BuyNothing app, and we’re so grateful for the 620,000 of you who have joined our local gifting network, keeping us in the top 200 social media apps worldwide since our launch!

And now we want to give back.

In celebration of BuyNothing Day, and if you make a contribution today to help us keep our gifting platform alive (please visit https://buynothingproject.org/contribute to support us), we're offering our time and presence for a Zoom call to be scheduled in the upcoming weeks.

We could join you in one of the following:

-A guest appearance at your virtual book group, to discuss our book (please find it at your local library

-If you have a Buy Nothing community, we'd love to virtually connect with you and your neighbors to talk all things gift economy

-If you’re starting a new BN community, we’d be happy to chat with you about how to grow your own local gifting community.

With your contribution, we'd love to connect with you and your community, to share our BN stories, and hear yours. Your contributions go 100% toward our website and platform hosting fees. Please Support us today!

Here’s how:

1) Make your contribution at https://buynothingproject.org/contribute today! (Our offer is open until midnight, Pacific Time, today!)

2) Email us at librarian@buynothingproject.org to let us know you’d like to have us join you virtually for a discussion about all things Buy Nothing!

3) We’ll give you a Supporter Token (orange heart) that goes next to your profile image in the BuyNothing app.

4) And we’ll be back in touch via email to schedule a date and time for our virtual meeting.

Thank you so much for your contributions, it’s what keeps this movement going.

]]> Newsletter: Gifting, Buy Nothing-Style http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/caylbsi9e1-newsletter-gifting-buy-nothing-style http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/caylbsi9e1-newsletter-gifting-buy-nothing-style?amp=true Wed, 21 Dec 2022 04:02:00 +0300 BNP Founders Newsletters

Newsletter: Gifting, Buy Nothing-Style

New Buy Nothing Newsletter Just Dropped

Click through to read our latest newsletter, and subscribe to receive future editions via email.

]]> The Buy Nothing Forest http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/m31ut923m1-the-buy-nothing-forest http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/m31ut923m1-the-buy-nothing-forest?amp=true Fri, 30 Dec 2022 09:01:00 +0300 BNP Founders

The Buy Nothing Forest

Plant a tree in the Buy Nothing Forest and you'll be giving SO MANY GIFTS:

The gift of clean air
The gift of food, jobs, shade, and beauty
The gift of carbon sequestration
The gift of joy when you follow your tree online
Support for the Buy Nothing Project (we get a small percentage of each tree contribution to cover our monthly operating expenses)
All of the above shared with another person when you gift stewardship of your Buy Nothing Forest tree to them!

For more about what we're up to with help from Treedom, click through here to visit the Buy Nothing Forest portal! From now until 15 January, 2023, you can get 20% off your Buy Nothing Forest tree contribution by using GIVE20 in the discount code field when you check out.

Thank you for helping us plant a thriving forest as a gift to our fellow humans, animals, and beloved Mother Earth!

]]> An Update About Buy Nothing Updates http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/y1tr5azsn1-an-update-about-buy-nothing-updates http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/y1tr5azsn1-an-update-about-buy-nothing-updates?amp=true Fri, 20 Jan 2023 01:07:00 +0300 BNP Founders How to Stay Up-To-Date with Buy Nothing

An Update About Buy Nothing Updates

Are you wondering how to stay up to date on Buy Nothing resources, initiatives, updates, and changes?

This blog post is for you!

If you'd like to be the first to know about any important Buy Nothing updates or changes, subscribe to follow our blog by adding your email and clicking "Subscribe" in the "Follow Our Blog" box at the top or bottom of our blog's home page.

If you're building a Buy Nothing community either in our BuyNothing app or in a Buy Nothing group using Facebook's Private Groups platform, we hope you'll join us a registered Community Builder. Learn more on our Build page.

Here are the things we do post about here:

Substantive changes to our foundational documents. For example, if we add a rule, we'll let you know via a blog post. If we delete a rule, we'll let you know about it via a blog post.
Creation of new Buy Nothing resources or systems. When we add a new tool to help you bring Buy Nothing to life for your community, we'll post about that here. When we create new support systems, forums, resources, etc, we'll post about those here, too.
Launching of new Buy Nothing initiatives. When we find new ways to broaden and deepen the positive impact Buy Nothing has on the world, we'll post about it here.

Here are things we don't post about:

Housekeeping.

What do we mean by housekeeping? We mean that we don't usually post about it when we do any of the following:

Correction of typos, verb conjugations, and broken links
Replacement of poorly-worded text to clarify our original intent
Rearrangement of paragraphs or sections within a web page, document, or other resource
Rearrangement of our website, resources, or documents
Updates to our websites' menus or design
Other similar work that tidies things up, makes it easier to find things, clarifies confusion, or corrects mistakes

When we have Big Changes that alter a previous rule or understanding, or that add something new and exciting, we will most definitely post about that here.

If you subscribe to follow this blog, you'll receive near-immediate notice of any updates, changes, or new resources and initiatives in your email inbox.

When we make small edits and updates that tidy things up, correct mistakes, or clarify points of confusion, we do that work quietly and without fanfare or requests for your attention that will fill up your inbox.

Please visit our Help Center or Contact Us if we can be of any assistance with anything Buy Nothing-related.

We thank you for bringing Buy Nothing to life in your community!

]]> How are Your Donations to Buy Nothing Put to Use? http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/ys7i5m5mh1-how-are-your-donations-to-buy-nothing-pu http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/ys7i5m5mh1-how-are-your-donations-to-buy-nothing-pu?amp=true Mon, 12 Jun 2023 06:40:00 +0300 BNP Founders

How are Your Donations to Buy Nothing Put to Use?

Why do we ask for donations for the Buy Nothing Project and how are you contributions put to use? Great question and we’d love to tell you:

For the first 9 years of Buy Nothing, we paid all of the expenses ourselves, using income from our other day jobs to cover the administrative and organizational costs of supporting this movement that’s grown to include over 7 million participants. As more people join Buy Nothing, the costs have risen and we need to ask you to chip in with a tax-deductible donation to help keep Buy Nothing alive. What expenses are we talking about? And how do we put them to use?

We’re going to use one of the recurring tasks we’re tackling this month to parse just a few of our monthly expenses out.

We’re one month away from celebrating our 10th anniversary and it’s time to do our biannual membership count! How do we do it?

It’s easy to count the number of people in the BuyNothing app as our Google Analytics account can tell us how many neighbors we’re serving at any given moment. Our Google Analytics account costs us a monthly fee, and it sure saves us time!

For our Facebook groups’ membership, we have to count those numbers by hand. It takes us 2 weeks of after-hours data entry (beyond our regular daily Buy Nothing volunteer jobs) to input the number of Buy Nothing members in each Buy Nothing Facebook group into a database we maintain to calculate those numbers, twice a year. At last count our membership had reached 7 million neighbors worldwide in 7000 groups!

Our database costs us a monthly fee and our website, where we maintain our comprehensive “Find Your Buy Nothing Community” list, also costs us a monthly fee.

We then broadcast those numbers out to our volunteers and members via our Slack channels and our Mail Chimp-powered newsletters which also cost a monthly fee.

We spend hours each day in our G-suite, our social media accounts, and on Canny (in the BuyNothing app) responding to hundreds of emails, messages, and tags from people who need help with their Buy Nothing experience. We provide free support to Buy Nothing Admins and Community Builders (the volunteers whose service is a profound gift to their communities), and participants in all sorts of Buy Nothing communities. Both of these communication platforms charge a monthly fee. And we adjust settings for users in the app via Django, when they want Community Builder status or have made a donation, and Django also costs us a monthly fee, along with all of our server storage costs. We also pay each month to host the Buy Nothing Help Center where people can access free resources and get in touch with our all-volunteer team.

Why does an accurate Buy Nothing participant count matter?

The #1 asked question we get via media interviews is…”How many people worldwide are part of your movement?” So, although we can’t keep a weekly count, our growth is important for us to report, as it tracks how quickly local gift economies are spreading around the world.

By tracking our 6-month growth, we can also track our growth alongside economic, social, and environmental influences. The more we understand how these factors are impacting people around the globe, the more we can improve things like our Buy Nothing Academy, and create new resources for our public library (in more languages) for our website, to help more people bring Buy Nothing to life in ways that help them and their communities.

When we have an accurate number of Buy Nothing participants, we can use this along with aggregate data about the number of gifts given and shared in communities to calculate our collective circular economy impact. All 7 million+ of us using Buy Nothing are making a meaningful impact in many ways, and we need an accurate count to help us (and the researchers who contact us) calculate how together we alleviate some of the impact of poverty, empower wealth accumulation for people who haven’t had easy access to this, redirect items from becoming landfill waste, reduce our carbon footprint, increase our emotional and social well-being, and more.

This might sound rather dry and academic, but accurate metrics help us tell the truth, and the truth can be profoundly inspirational both in terms of individual action and larger societal shifts. It will also enable us to receive grants in the future and to form working relationships with municipalities, organizations, and businesses to increase our collective impact for the better. Your participation in Buy Nothing matters, and your donations help us show the world what we’re all building together, to inspire more people to make gift economy sharing part of their lives, too. Thank you!

With gratitude,

Liesl & Rebecca on behalf of the entire Buy Nothing Volunteer Team

]]> Buy Nothing Deliveries Pilot Project http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/1zxtr7ein1-buy-nothing-deliveries-pilot-project http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/1zxtr7ein1-buy-nothing-deliveries-pilot-project?amp=true Fri, 23 Jun 2023 01:45:00 +0300 BNP Founders

Buy Nothing Deliveries Pilot Project

Announcing Qualified Local Deliveries, Moving and Junk Hauling for Buy Nothing-ers

Many of you have asked for help picking up large Buy Nothing gifts - You can always request the Gift of pick-up and delivery help, but that’s not always possible. Currently, many large items go to the landfill simply because transporting them presents a challenge. We’re working to solve this problem!

If you live in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, or Portland, OR, discounted deliveries are now available for you as an experimental pilot project. If your neighbors are not able to help you get your gift moved for free, we’ve forged a connection with Dolly, a licensed and bonded company that hires background-checked neighbors to help with transport and heavy lifting.

Dolly Helpers are standing by to pick-up and deliver anything you might need moved from A to B. While this is a paid service, you’ll receive a Buy Nothing discount—and you support a neighbor who works in the gig economy, utilizing their vehicle to help move items such as large appliances, sofas, tables, large furniture, etc. Dolly has their own claims department to deal with issues that sometimes come up when large or heavy items are being moved.

Please visit https://get.dolly.com/bn, use the gift code GRATITUDE, and book your pick-up and delivery today! PS, this code works with any Dolly service, whether you’re moving a single Buy Nothing gift or an entire apartment.

If you’re not in one of our pilot cities and would like this service, please let us know via this form.

This is the section of the fine print where we’d announce that this is an affiliate partnership, except Buy Nothing will not receive anything from your use of Dolly’s services - Right now, we’re passing the benefits of this relationship with Dolly.com entirely on to you!

]]> Welcome to BuyNothing 2.0! http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/54hvuaf7y1-welcome-to-buynothing-20 http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/54hvuaf7y1-welcome-to-buynothing-20?amp=true Fri, 14 Jul 2023 00:52:00 +0300 BNP Founders

Welcome to BuyNothing 2.0!

Buy Nothing Turns 10

Thank you all so much for joining us over the past decade, for bringing Buy Nothing to life with us! We’ll never forget that first week, exactly a decade ago, when we set up our first Buy Nothing Project gift economy in our home town on Bainbridge Island, WA. Within hours, we had over a hundred members who were giddy, trying out new posts in our experiment asking friends and neighbors to buy less and share more. Within days, more communities asked for a Buy Nothing gift economy in their neighborhood. Since then, we’ve kept our eye on the possibility of building our own platform, to form-fit our vision of collaborative giving, sharing, asking, borrowing, lending to every community on Earth. We just got closer to that goal: Welcome to Buy Nothing 2.0!

In this new version of the Buy Nothing app, 3 new welcome screens highlight what you can do: You Give, you Ask, you express your Gratitude, you put yourself in the center of your community with many options for adjusting your sharing radius, and you track your impact.

2.0 is for Everyone

We've been listening to feedback from current BuyNothing users, and we're proud to bring some of your top requested improvements to life with BuyNothing 2.0. Here’s CTO, Hugh Molotsi’s, roundup of the improvements we’ve added to 2.0:

You can now use Buy Nothing 2.0 on an iPad or Android tablet
Our Search function now matches strings of words with those same words in post description and matches neighbors’ names. We also highlight what matches
You can now delete comments on your posts
You can now update your Gift status from the Home feed (Pending Pickup, Gifted, Ask Fulfilled, etc.)
You can now edit your posts from the Home feed
We’ve fixed tons of bugs and performance issues
We’ve added color to the Give/Ask/Gratitude Post Action box
We’ve improved the app’s loading speed

Sustaining Members

We also present you with the option to become a Sustaining Member by subscribing for $6.99/month or $49.99/year. By subscribing to premium features in the app, on either a monthly or discounted annual basis, you help sustain Buy Nothing so we can continue to build out new features for everyone. When you’re a Sustaining Member, you have access to features built just for you and you’ll get a first chance to utilize features we’ll later roll out to everyone.

We’re starting with 2 Sustaining Member features (and we're putting the finishing touches on more). The first feature that's live now allows you to save multiple sharing locations (Buy Nothing at work, on vacation, or at your parents’ house, etc), making it very fast and easy to connect with all of the Buy Nothing communities you’re part of.

Our second feature is a status update for posts: You can mark your post as “Let it Simmer” to signal to your neighbors that you’ll choose a recipient after waiting to let more people throw their names into the proverbial hat, or you can mark your gift as a “Flash Give,” meaning you’d like to give it away immediately. These are already cultural norms within Buy Nothing communities and we know neighbors will love this easier way to mark gifts, to set expectations that benefit the givers and recipients alike.

Please test out our new features, enjoy the improved performance of the app, and consider becoming a Sustaining Member. You’ll recognize Sustaining Members in your community with this green leaf badge:

Thank you!

Our deep gratitude to each of you for your patience with the app. We created our build with contributions from friends and family and have had to deal with technical issues on further limited resources. The challenges are certainly not over, but with contributions from our Supporters and subscriptions from Sustaining Members, we’ll keep on making improvements for everyone.

]]> 2 New App Features http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/3xucxmvvk1-2-new-app-features http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/3xucxmvvk1-2-new-app-features?amp=true Thu, 20 Jul 2023 21:06:00 +0300 BNP Founders Update BuyNothing today to access these new features

2 New App Features

Introducing 2 New App Features

Update your app today for 2 new features: Everyone now has access to a feature that shows who likes your posts, and if you're a Sustaining Member, you can now bookmark your favorite posts.

To enable these features, be sure you’re using BuyNothing 2.0.2 (186). You can tell which version of the app you’re using by going to your app settings: Go to “Me” page, then click on the gray gear in the upper right corner of the screen and then just below “Settings” in the upper left part of the screen you’ll see your version number.

We'd like to send an extra thank you to all Sustaining Members for subscribing to our premium features, and for being early adopters and testers of our newest features! Over the course of your membership, you’ll be first to receive our newest global features as well as special bells and whistles reserved for Sustaining Members. Please update your app because we’ve already built a new one for you, available in point release: Bookmarks!

When you're a Sustaining Member, this feature empowers you to track your favorite posts by bookmarking them, and then you can filter your posts by viewing your bookmarks in the Home feed. Easy!

We’ve also released to everyone the ability to see who likes your posts. Just click on the 3 dots at the upper right corner of your posts and you’ll enjoy a look at your supportive fans! Share the love with your neighbors and “like” their posts, too.

We’ll do our best to let you know when new features are made available so you can enjoy them. Keep an eye out in the app for posts from Buy Nothing Community, check our blog here for updates, and follow us on social media to stay in touch (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and soon on TikTok)

Quick Tip for Everyone: Did you know that you can jump back to the top of the main Home feed by simply clicking on the Home button? We didn’t either. Just discovered that gem this week!

Yours in Gifting,

Liesl & Rebecca

Your Buy Nothing Volunteer Co-Founders

]]> Buy Nothing 2.0.3 is Live! http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/6rbo9mvu91-buy-nothing-203-is-live http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/6rbo9mvu91-buy-nothing-203-is-live?amp=true Tue, 05 Sep 2023 01:23:00 +0300 BNP Founders

Buy Nothing 2.0.3 is Live!

Every Buy Nothing App user is now updated to our latest point release, 2.0.3, and we’re excited to announce the following new features and fixes:

• Global Posts from the Buy Nothing Community: Tips and Announcements that everyone around the world can comment on. We’re most excited about the global discussions we’ll be able to have, focusing on app features and tips and sharing ideas and inspiration to help us all reduce-reuse-rethink and enjoy the Buy Nothing lifestyle. You’ll also be able to share these posts on other platforms, to invite more people into Buy Nothing.

• New post status: “Ask - No Longer Needed”. By popular demand, we’ve added this new feature to the “Ask” post status options. If you’ve asked for something but no longer need it for any reason, use this status to remove your post from the Active posts feed.

• Sharing posts: Now you can share links to your own posts outside of BuyNothing! You can also share our Buy Nothing Community global posts. This makes it easy if you’d like to cross-post in your Buy Nothing group on Facebook, to your own timeline or Twitter feed, etc. This is a great way to build your BN community!

• View Community Members: Toggle between “latest to join” and “earliest to join”. You can now see who has most recently joined your community and who the first adopters of the Buy Nothing app were in your community by toggling the sorting tab on your Community page. You’ll find this toggle below the green “Invite a friend” button and the “People in Your Community” header. Welcome your neighbors as they join BN!

• Subscription screen update: We’ve included a “Learn more” link for details about our Sustaining Member benefits.

• Feed is more responsive to screen orientation changes: In grid view, you can now see more columns in landscape mode!

• Several bug fixes: As always, we’re chasing and squashing bugs that come up, like the ever-persistent notification glitches!

]]> Share Your BN Posts! http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/j2k3bsyh61-share-your-bn-posts http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/j2k3bsyh61-share-your-bn-posts?amp=true Fri, 08 Sep 2023 04:21:00 +0300 BNP Founders Build More Connections Easily

Share Your BN Posts!

Now you can easily generate a link to each of your Buy Nothing posts that you can use to send friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors to your Give, Ask, or Gratitude. Sharing your posts has a lot of benefits, including:

Share in a wider circle: Now you can write up your post once, add your favorite photo(s), and share this single post with multiple people and/or groups, on multiple platforms.

Keep track of responses in a single location: When you share your post and ask people to reply on Buy Nothing, you’ll be able to keep track of everyone who comments.

Share your pick-up location and instructions privately and easily: You only need to enter your gift pick-up location and any special instructions once in Buy Nothing, then you can save this information and have it added automatically to future private messages for your selected gift recipients. And your pick-up location will open in their phone’s map program, so you won’t need to type out directions ever again.

Inspire people to join your Buy Nothing community: There’s nothing like seeing what your neighbors are giving away and asking for to help people understand the beauty and joy that grows in a Buy Nothing community. Sharing your BN posts on other platforms gives your friends and followers a window into the magic.

Strengthen the Buy Nothing Project: For the past 10 years, Buy Nothing has grown on a variety of platforms, and there’s been no way for us to connect all of the pieces and people of the whole. Now we can share our BN posts with each other, connecting all of the pieces into the big picture.

How to Share Your Posts:

To see all of your posts, tap Me in the bottom horizontal taskbar
Tap the post you’d like to share
Tap the 3 gray dots in the right hand corner of your screen, to the side of your name
Tap on “Share Post”
Select how or where you’d like to share and tap to make it happen:
You can click to copy the link, then open another app, an email, etc to paste the link where you’d like to post or share it.
Your device may give you the option to share it directly to a platform such as Facebook Groups or Messenger, your phone’s default SMS program, etc without needing to copy the link manually.

]]> Beach Waste: Are These Your Clothes? http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/d1itp0lgh1-beach-waste-are-these-your-clothes http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/d1itp0lgh1-beach-waste-are-these-your-clothes?amp=true Thu, 06 Jun 2024 19:09:00 +0300 BNP Founders

Beach Waste: Are These Your Clothes?

By Hugh Molotsi: Buy Nothing Project President and CTO

Photo: Muntaka Chasant/Shutterstock

You may have read about the tragic piles of discarded used clothes that line a beach in Accra, Ghana. My question to you, are some of these clothes yours?

The average US resident throws out 81 pounds of clothing each year. While donating your clothes to thrift stores is much better than throwing them out, that is by no means a perfect solution. Perhaps less than 20% of clothes donated will be sold in thrift stores, the rest destined for textile recyclers, salvage buyers, and landfills (where 85% of all textiles end up). Salvage buyers will export clothes in bulk to second-hand clothing markets like Ghana where they will be picked through and what's left is how we end up with beach waste (see What Really Happens to the Clothes You Donate). Yes, that sweater you so dutifully donated could be in that mess!

Clearly our consumption habits are not good for the planet and why there is a rising movement to reuse rather than throw away. Thankfully Gen Z is more concerned with climate change than any generation before.

So what is a better way?

I'm proud to work at BuyNothing, a worldwide network of local gift economies enabling us all to share what we have in excess and ask for exactly what we want. BuyNothing was founded 10 years ago by Liesl Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller as Facebook groups and now includes a dedicated platform with iOS and Android apps. We have over one million users of the app and over ten million members in our Facebook groups.

A Yale doctoral student conducted a study of BuyNothing communities in Connecticut, Idaho and Tennessee, and calculated that over 70,000 metric tonnes of goods are diverted from the landfill each year.

When you gift an item on BuyNothing, you know it is going directly to the person who will make use of it. Not only do you get to feel good about giving a gift, you also know your sweater won't end up on a beach somewhere!

Also, when you need something, BuyNothing is a great resource to ask rather than spend money. People have been gifted a wide myriad of items on the platform including clothes, electronics, strollers, tools, and even a car!

Join the movement!

Even with our millions of members, we are still a nascent community and we could use your help to expand our impact.

Join the community by downloading the mobile app today. Start by gifting something that's been sitting around your house unused for years.
Make a contribution to help us pay for our server hosting costs and other operations. Please reach out to me if you'd like to invest in our B-Corp.
Become a volunteer! We could especially use developers and testers to help us improve and add more functionality to our service.

]]> BuyNothing Upcycling: A No-Sew T-Shirt Bag http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/f1ck9y0f21-buynothing-upcycling-a-no-sew-t-shirt-ba http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/f1ck9y0f21-buynothing-upcycling-a-no-sew-t-shirt-ba?amp=true Wed, 26 Jun 2024 17:56:00 +0300 BNP Founders

BuyNothing Upcycling: A No-Sew T-Shirt Bag

By Rebecca Rockefeller & Liesl Clark

Reducing textile and clothing waste is one impactful way we can each make a difference as we participate in BuyNothing. Among the top 10 items in our list of "50 Things We Never Buy", from our book The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan, are reusable cloth bags. These are the bags you bring with you to go shopping so you don’t have to use a store’s “paper or plastic.” Most reusable bags are made of microplastic textile fibers and we believe you never need to buy these. If you don't have any reusable bags for grocery shopping, you can always ask for them in your BuyNothing gift economy, or make your own.

Rebecca’s no-sew T-shirt bag takes 10 minutes or less to make, and is a simple alternative to the plastic and paper bags found in stores.

Rebecca’s No-Sew T-Shirt Bag:
By repurposing a used t-shirt and cutting down on single-use bags, this T-shirt Bag is a Buy Nothing win-win.

● Cut off the sleeves of an old T-shirt to make the outside edges of the bag’s handles. You can turn these into rags; these are especially good for drying glasses, both the kind you read with and the kind you drink from.

● Cut off the neckline to form the bag’s opening and the inside edges of the handles. Set the neckline loop aside for another use - I love to use these around my journals, as head or hair bands, and to tie up my tomato plants in the summer.

● Does your t-shirt have a turned-over and stitched hem at its waist? If so, you can cut it off and save it with the neckline to make this next step easier.

● Fold the shirt flat on a table and take the right and left corners of the bottom in hand. Tie them together in a square knot (right over left, then left over right) to form a closed bottom for your bag. If they’re too short to tie, use that neckline loop to gather and tie them together on the inside or outside of the shirt (either works, pick the look you like best). Your bag is ready to use.

]]> Happy New Year and Meta's Recent Decision http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/hhis0ck9c1-happy-new-year-and-metas-recent-decision http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/hhis0ck9c1-happy-new-year-and-metas-recent-decision?amp=true Fri, 17 Jan 2025 00:20:00 +0300 BNP Founders

Happy New Year and Meta's Recent Decision

Dear Buy Nothing Community,

Happy New Year! I hope this message finds you well and that 2025 brings joy, connection, and abundance to you and your loved ones.

Over the last week, I’ve heard from many of you regarding Meta’s decision to end its third-party fact-checking program. I strongly sympathize with your concerns about what this announcement could mean for civil discourse in general and, specifically, for our shared experience on such an important social media and commerce platform.

Since its inception in 2013, the Buy Nothing Project has prioritized trust, security, and transparency as its guiding principles. These values have shaped and strengthened our community, allowing it to grow to over 12 million Facebook Group members, in over 8,500 groups, across more than 40 countries. It is this shared commitment that makes our project so impactful and meaningful. I want to assure you that these principles will not change.

Working alongside our tireless and talented group administrators, we remain steadfast in upholding the values and guidelines that have made the Buy Nothing Project such an important part of our lives and communities. Together, we will continue to foster generosity, sustainability, and connection.

Facebook has been an essential platform for building our community, and it will continue to play a significant role in our growth. However, as Meta’s recent announcement demonstrates, there may be aspects of the future Buy Nothing experience on Facebook that will be beyond our control. For this reason, as I previously shared, we have developed the dedicated BuyNothing app and website, both of which are free to use, and run by volunteers. These platforms are designed to provide a safe and human-centered environment for our community to thrive.

We are continuously working to improve the experience on these platforms and are excited to share some big updates in the coming months. Stay tuned for more news about the ways we’re making the Buy Nothing Project even better and more accessible.

Thank you for being an integral part of our community. Your generosity, care, and engagement inspire us every day. Here’s to another year of giving, sharing, and growing together. Wishing you all a safe and healthy New Year.

With gratitude,
Liesl Clark
Co-Founder and CEO, Buy Nothing Project

]]> Why Buy Nothing Matters More Than Ever (and How You Can Help) http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/m0ro682u01-why-buy-nothing-matters-more-than-ever-a http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/m0ro682u01-why-buy-nothing-matters-more-than-ever-a?amp=true Sun, 20 Apr 2025 16:21:00 +0300 BNP Founders

Why Buy Nothing Matters More Than Ever (and How You Can Help)

I've always believed in the power of community and the abundance that comes from sharing. But lately, I've seen firsthand how crucial these principles have become in our increasingly challenging world.

More and more, I hear stories from neighbors struggling with job losses, rising costs, and the general uncertainty of our times. It's heartbreaking, but it also reinforces why Buy Nothing exists: to create a safety net, woven from the threads of generosity and connection, right in our own neighborhoods.

Think about it. When you Give, Ask, and share Gratitude within your local Buy Nothing community, you're not just exchanging items. You're building relationships, fostering trust, and creating a support system that benefits everyone.

I experienced this firsthand during a recent visit with my mom. We noticed the price of a dozen eggs had skyrocketed to a shocking $12.99! We knew we could do something better for our community. So, we decided to expand her flock of four hens.

But here's the kicker: pullets (those 6-month-old laying dynamos) are scarce, due to egg prices being front-and-center on the political spectrum. Agway and the local co-op have been unable to source pullets for months. The egg rush is real!

Enter your local Buy Nothing community. I suggested Mom post an Ask for laying hens. Within HOURS, she had an offer for FIVE one-year-olds, delivered – by Angela – straight to her coop!

Now, she's been giving the home-laid organic eggs away to her closest neighbors, and they're so greatly appreciated. Her story is a testament to the power of community and resourcefulness. In a world of rising costs, sometimes the best solutions are right next door through the Buy Nothing platform.

This story, like so many I hear from our members, highlights why Buy Nothing has never been more important. We're not just a platform; we're a lifeline.

That's why I'm asking for your support.

We're working tirelessly to improve our platform and reach more people worldwide. This requires resources: server fees, development costs, and the technological stack needed to build new features like private groups within the app. The truth is, right now, we're not even paying salaries to the dedicated individuals who make this happen.

Every little bit helps. Your optional subscription directly fuels our ability to:

Enhance the user experience.
Expand our reach to more communities.
Develop new features that strengthen connections.

It's time for us all to find ways to help, seizing the moment to build resilience in our communities. We can watch out for each other and create a unique experience on the Buy Nothing mobile and web app, independently produced, free of advertising, and we don’t sell your private data to third parties.

Let's work together to create a world where everyone has access to the support they need, right in their own backyard.

Here are easy steps for contributing to The Buy Nothing Project:

• Make a charitable donation via our fiscal sponsor on our Give Lively Page
• Make a direct contribution to help us out
• Become a Sustaining Member of the BuyNothing by subscribing in our web/mobile app
• Offer us a tip on the BuyNothing app the next time you have a successful Give or Ask (watch for the banner at the top of your screen)

Thank you for being part of this movement.

With gratitude,

Liesl and the Buy Nothing Team
(Liesl Clark is Co-Founder & Co-Volunteer of The Buy Nothing Project)

]]> Participating in the Buy Nothing Project Mission http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/jyt9p36ln1-participating-in-the-buy-nothing-project http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/jyt9p36ln1-participating-in-the-buy-nothing-project?amp=true Wed, 06 Aug 2025 16:22:00 +0300 BNP Founders

Participating in the Buy Nothing Project Mission

At The Buy Nothing Project, our mission is at the heart of everything we do: We exist to renew the relational fabric of communities through abundance, trust, and genuine connection — by enabling neighbours and communities to give, receive, share, and express gratitude in a hyper-local gift economy where real wealth is found in human connection. In fewer words: Our mission is to change the way the world consumes.

We believe that the more people and communities participate in our mission, the stronger our mission becomes. With the explosive growth of Buy Nothing communities around the world, it has been important to ensure a consistent and understood gifting experience across the more than 8,000 groups currently active on Meta. We have three clear criteria for groups to participate: they must be a true gift economy, link to our official website, and register with us.

We Welcome All Buy Nothing Groups!

We know there are many Buy Nothing groups on Meta with varying rules and iterations. We welcome them all, so long as they are a gift community and they link back to The Buy Nothing Project website.

We strongly encourage all Meta gift communities that call themselves "Buy Nothing" and do not currently link back to our website to join us! Come register your group with us and get support for your admin team and your participants while using the Buy Nothing name and resources to continue to build your gift economy. We would love to welcome you to the official Buy Nothing family.

When you join the Buy Nothing brand, there's an expectation of what happens in our communities. This is why it's important that all Buy Nothing gift communities link back to our website, are registered with us, and are gift communities — not buy-sell-trade groups or barter groups. This consistency ensures that every participant understands the core values of giving freely and widely, fostering genuine community connection, and reducing waste.

If you are a member of a Meta Buy Nothing group and notice that the group (in their About section or Rules) does not link back to The Buy Nothing Project website, please consider sharing this blog post with your Buy Nothing admin. We genuinely welcome your group to join us and become part of our official network. If the admin does not link up with us and continues to use our name, you are welcome to let us know. We will then review the group and try to reach out to the admin directly.

Maintaining a Trusted Member Experience

In 2021, we took a crucial step to safeguard this mission and ensure its integrity for everyone: We trademarked our name.

Trademarking our name isn't about exclusivity; it's about protection and clarity. We trademarked "Buy Nothing" to ensure that The Buy Nothing Project's intellectual property—our core guidelines, our philosophy of hyper-local gift economies, and the very essence of what we stand for—remains accessible to as many people as possible, while staying true to our core vision.

This legal step allows us to:

Protect our Mission: It ensures that the "Buy Nothing" name is consistently associated with genuine gift communities where there is no selling, trading, or bartering. This prevents dilution of our core values and keeps the movement focused on pure gifting.
Maintain Brand Integrity: Just as any brand protects its identity, we must protect ours. Our trademark helps us ensure that when someone encounters "Buy Nothing," they know it represents a specific, ethical, and community-driven approach to consumption.
Fulfill Legal Responsibility: As the creators and stewards of The Buy Nothing Project, we have a legal responsibility to protect our intellectual property. This includes enforcing our trademark to prevent misuse or misrepresentation that could confuse our community members or undermine our efforts.
Support All Official Groups: We are an incubator of local gift communities. We provide support for all official Buy Nothing gift communities, their admins, and their members. By linking back to our website, these groups receive the benefit of consistent guidelines, resources, and a connection to the broader movement. We also list and map all registered and official Buy Nothing communities on our platform, our web and mobile app, making each private gifting community accessible and discoverable. Our platform also hosts 1.5 million neighbors who participate outside of private groups on Meta. The BuyNothing web and mobile app is the home of Buy Nothing, where our team is building a custom gifting platform – offering a better, more secure, and more impactful experience that aligns with our core mission.

Addressing Misuse and Ensuring Consistency

Unfortunately, when individuals or groups use our Buy Nothing name without adhering to our principles or linking back to our official website, it can create confusion and dilute the true meaning of the movement.

This is why we have had to, and will continue to, work with Meta to shut down groups that do not meet the following criteria:

Link back to our website.
Be an actual gift economy (i.e., they do not allow selling, trading, or bartering).
Register with The Buy Nothing Project so we can include them on our official map and list, making them accessible to community members.

This proactive approach, utilizing Meta's Brand Rights Protection Program, allows brands like ours to identify and report content for counterfeit, trademark, and copyright infringement and business impersonation across all Meta technologies. Any group that simply changes its name, yet continues to use our intellectual property or permutations of it, will also be removed by Meta via this program. This is a necessary step to ensure that the spirit and rules of Buy Nothing are upheld.

Together, we're building a global movement rooted in generosity and community. Every registered group and every shared item strengthens our collective vision for a more sustainable and connected world. Thank you for being a vital part of the Buy Nothing family!

The Buy Nothing Project Volunteer Team

]]> The BuyNothing Safety Net: Why Our Network is Essential as SNAP Benefits Change http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/57vst6ho81-the-buynothing-safety-net-why-our-networ http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/57vst6ho81-the-buynothing-safety-net-why-our-networ?amp=true Thu, 30 Oct 2025 04:20:00 +0300 BNP Founders

The BuyNothing Safety Net: Why Our Network is Essential as SNAP Benefits Change

What we all know as the social safety net is currently facing new pressures, and the impact is immediate, painful, and felt deeply in every neighborhood. As the US federal Supplemental and Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits and in some states the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) benefits are officially rolled back for millions of Americans, the question for us at the BuyNothing community is simple: How do we respond?

The answer is already emerging from the heart of our network: By doing what we do best: turning neighborly abundance into a lifeline.

The Irmo, SC Model: Neighbors Taking Action

We are incredibly proud to highlight the leadership of a Buy Nothing Facebook Group Admin, Chelsea Christensen, in Irmo, South Carolina, whose actions embody the spirit of our movement. Recognizing the urgency of local food insecurity, she is organizing "Buy Nothing Grocery Shopping Days" monthly, starting in November.

The concept is pure BuyNothing:

Abundance-Driven: Neighbors are encouraged to gift food they have in excess, i.e. extra pantry staples, garden harvests, duplicate purchases, or bulk items. Neighbors can even, yes, buy groceries for neighbors and bring them to the events.
Zero-Barrier Access: Everyone in the community is invited to come and take what they need, no questions asked, no strings attached.

This is not charity; it is neighbors building resilience, person-to-person. This model of radical generosity is exactly why we built The Buy Nothing Project.

Our Challenge: Making BuyNothing the Community’s First Response

We can, and must, scale this localized generosity across our global network. The BuyNothing platform is built to solve for this kind of immediate, hyper-local need.

Here is how we can activate our network right now:

1. Adopt "Buy Nothing Grocery Days"

Admins and Community Builders in both Facebook Groups and on the BuyNothing platform should feel empowered to establish a regular "Grocery Day", whether that's a weekly prompt for pantry clean-outs or a monthly organized event modeled after Irmo's model.

2. Post a List of Freesources to Your Community

Admins and Community Builders are welcome to post (and pin in BuyNothing groups on Facebook) a list of community Freesources like local food pantries and community gatherings where excess food and produce from farmers is being shared freely. We provide guidance on how to do this in Lesson 2 of the Buy Nothing Academy.

3. The Power of the Simple "Ask"

We want every member to understand: It is absolutely okay to Ask for food and essential household items.

Don't Crush Yourself with Shame: Forget the shame and fear often associated with traditional aid. In a gift economy, asking is the act that creates abundance. Your Ask validates the generosity of your neighbors and completes the circular loop.
Use the BuyNothing Platform's Tools: On our platform, it is easier than ever to post a simple Ask to your immediate geographic circle, where help can arrive quickly and discreetly.

Our Vision: A World Where No One Goes Hungry

This movement began with the idea that our communities are not defined by scarcity, but by abundance. The rollback of government aid is a challenge, but it is also an undeniable opportunity for our network to prove its value as a powerful, alternative social safety net. We can use our platform to gather what’s in abundance and share it with neighbors so nothing ever goes to waste.

Let's continue to be the place where ingenuity, kindness, and direct human connection solve the hardest problems. Let's make "Going without" something that simply doesn't happen in a BuyNothing community.

]]> An Important Message About Your Buy Nothing Facebook Group http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/eiuj36r9r1-an-important-message-about-your-buy-noth http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/eiuj36r9r1-an-important-message-about-your-buy-noth?amp=true Thu, 30 Oct 2025 19:24:00 +0300 BNP Founders

An Important Message About Your Buy Nothing Facebook Group

Protecting the Integrity of BuyNothing Communities

Updated November 5, 2025, to provide additional context on how we support and protect BuyNothing communities on Facebook and beyond. You can find the original blog post below.

Thank you for being part of BuyNothing

Whether you participate on the BuyNothing platform or you’re part of a local BuyNothing Facebook group, your generosity and care for your community are what make this global movement thrive. Since our founding in 2013, more than 14 million people in over 8,000 communities have come together to share freely, with the help of more than 11,000 volunteers worldwide.

BuyNothing began with a simple idea: that giving, asking, and gratitude can build community and reduce waste. As the movement has grown into the millions, we’ve learned that keeping that experience safe and consistent takes time, care, and coordination.

Why we trademarked the BuyNothing name

To protect this growing movement and the spirit of generosity behind it, we registered and trademarked the BuyNothing name several years ago. This helps ensure that when people join a group called “Buy Nothing,” they can trust they’re entering a real BuyNothing community, focused on giving freely - not buying, selling, or trading - and guided by safety, inclusion and respect. Trademarking the name helps prevent misuse and protects the BuyNothing experience across all communities.

What registering with BuyNothing means for members

Facebook groups hoping to share the BuyNothing name and spirit need to register to become part of our community. Registration links each individual community to our verified network, ensuring that every group upholds the same values and safety standards. It also provides our members and admins with:

Trust: Members know that when they join a registered BuyNothing group, they’re part of a network guided by shared principles of generosity and respect.

Support: Group admins are connected to our volunteer-run BuyNothing Admin Hub for ongoing guidance and access to resources.

Accessibility: We maintain a public list of registered BuyNothing groups so anyone can find their neighborhood community easily.

Registration is how we make sure the name “BuyNothing” means the same thing everywhere: a safe, inclusive space for sharing abundance.

Why we act on misuse of the name

From time to time, groups appear on Facebook using the BuyNothing name without being registered. These unofficial groups can cause confusion for both members and admins, whether they belong to registered or unregistered communities. For instance, a member might join an unregistered group expecting the familiar local BuyNothing experience, only to find themselves in a public group, a buy/sell/trade group or a group that links back to a website that is impersonating BuyNothing. Unregistered groups frequently contact our help desk for assistance, and our volunteers do their best to support them, despite being outside our purview. Unfortunately, unregistered groups also have involved scams, phishing attempts, and other unsafe activity that becomes wrongly associated with the BuyNothing name.

Our process is the same everywhere and we've been transparent about it for years on our website and blog (see original post below). Meta reviews groups that are reported and removes those that use our name in ways that violate trademark law. By removing infringing content, Meta adheres to intellectual property laws and avoids potential legal liability. We don’t control the timing of those removals.

Less than 1% of BuyNothing Facebook groups have been affected by these actions. The vast majority of communities continue to grow and thrive, supported by thousands of volunteers around the world. Our goal is to protect the trust that makes the generosity of these communities possible.

Recent closures of unregistered BuyNothing Facebook Groups

Reviews of unregistered or non-compliant BuyNothing Facebook groups are ongoing and not linked to any specific event or outside policy change. We understand that some removals have coincided with the rollback to federal SNAP benefits. Timing of group removals is outside of our control, and no unregistered groups have been reported since the rollback began.

We continue to support neighbors facing hardship through the broader BuyNothing community, and we remain committed to ensuring everyone has safe, trusted ways to share what they have with each other. You can find more about how we’re empowering our BuyNothing communities to support those impacted by SNAP changes here.

Looking ahead

BuyNothing has always been about generosity, connection, and care for people and the planet. Safeguarding the name helps preserve that spirit, so when you see “BuyNothing,” you know it represents a space where giving is free, trust is valued, and members come together to make life a little easier and more enjoyable for one another.

We’re grateful to everyone who keeps this movement strong and true to its purpose.

*****************************************************************************

Original Blog Post, Dated 30.10.2025

We want to first thank everyone for being a dedicated member of a community focused on the transformative mission of BuyNothing, whether you are a member of your local BuyNothing Facebook Group or a member of the BuyNothing Platform. Your enthusiasm for giving, asking, and expressing gratitude is what makes this global movement so powerful. We deeply value everyone who participates.

Over the last few years we have seen a rise in non-registered BuyNothing Facebook Groups. We have systematically reported these groups to Meta, utilizing their Brand Protection Rights tools that allow for corporations to protect their trademarks. Unfortunately, some people may have thought they were participating in a BuyNothing community when they were not and have now found their group removed in violation of our trademark. We wanted to take the opportunity to explain why registration is so important.

Why Registration Matters

BuyNothing Facebook Groups are a global network of gifting communities, run by a volunteer team that has worked for years to build and protect the integrity of the mission. When we are contacted about starting a BuyNothing group on Facebook, we mandate registration as a way to protect our mission, the experience of our members, and the intellectual property we have built over the 13 years of growing this movement.

Registration ensures that:

You can trust the name: When a community is officially registered, it means it’s part of our verified network. This ensures we protect the BuyNothing name and mission for everyone.
Your community is supported: Registered groups link directly to our official website for community support. Furthermore, your group's volunteer admins are part of our Buy Nothing Admin Hub, where they receive ongoing, direct support from The Buy Nothing Project volunteer team.
Your group is easy to find: We maintain a public list of all registered BuyNothing groups, helping newcomers find and join the official BuyNothing community in their neighborhood.
Protecting our brand, which we built over a dozen years of learning, means we’re able to offer a consistent and safe experience for the wider community.

We have worked to make registration as easy and transparent as possible. But for those groups who wish to use our name and the promise it implies, and not register, our only option is to report them to the Meta Brand Protection Rights Program in the interest of protecting the much larger BuyNothing community.

How To Make Sure You Belong to a Licensed BuyNothing group

All licensed BuyNothing groups link back to our website in their group description (their “About” page) and/or in their group rules.

We are proud to share that over 8,000 BuyNothing groups are officially registered and part of The Buy Nothing Project network.

We invite you to join our free, global digital BuyNothing gifting platform, custom built for gifting communities. It allows you to participate in Giving, Asking, and Gratitude from wherever you are. You can join the movement at: buynothingapp.com.

We sincerely hope you will continue your journey with us and join an official community soon. Thank you for caring about The Buy Nothing Project mission!

]]> Our Commitment to Every Buy Nothing Facebook Group http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/v4ufd96cx1-our-commitment-to-every-buy-nothing-face http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/v4ufd96cx1-our-commitment-to-every-buy-nothing-face?amp=true Sat, 15 Nov 2025 20:23:00 +0300 BNP Founders

Our Commitment to Every Buy Nothing Facebook Group

The Buy Nothing Project was born on Facebook, and that is where the vast majority of our community continues to thrive. As we grow and innovate, we want to address any rumors or concerns directly and ensure every one of our neighbors knows exactly where we stand.

1. Thank You, Official Buy Nothing Family!

We want to start with a massive thank you to the over 90% of Buy Nothing Facebook groups and administrators who are officially registered with The Buy Nothing Project. Your commitment is the foundation of our global movement.

By registering, you help ensure a consistent, safe, and truly non-commercial experience that millions of Buy Nothing members have come to expect. You are the leaders who protect the integrity of the gift economy every single day!

2. Our Unwavering Commitment to Facebook Groups

Let us be absolutely clear with the Buy Nothing community: We have never, and do not now, have any plans to shut down or stop supporting Buy Nothing Facebook groups.

Our work every day is dedicated to strengthening the foundation built on Facebook:

Continuous Growth and Support: We actively build new official Buy Nothing Facebook groups and support their admins daily.
Essential Resources: We provide direct resources for thousands of admins in our Admin Support Group, offer Buy Nothing Facebook Admin training in our free Buy Nothing Academy, maintain hundreds of essential resource pages on our website, maintain the official list and worldwide clickable map of all Buy Nothing groups on Facebook so you can easily find your closest group, and provide continuous support via our dedicated volunteer Help Desk communications.

If your group is registered, you have access to these critical resources. We will continue to provide this support to you and the millions of neighbors in Buy Nothing groups on Facebook. And we do this as volunteers.

3. How to Verify Your Group’s Registration

Using the Buy Nothing name means your group is a true, private gifting community that links back to The Buy Nothing Project Website for official support, guidelines, and best practices.

If you are concerned about whether your Buy Nothing Facebook group is registered, verifying is simple and quick through our platform:

Open the BuyNothing app or web platform (https://buynothingapp.com/).
Go to your "Me" page and click the gear icon in the upper right corner.
Scroll down to "Registered BuyNothing groups."

There, you will see a clickable list and a map of all the officially registered groups around you, confirming your group is part of the global family.

4. Registering is Simple

If you discover your group is not yet registered, it is a simple process to join the official network!

By registering, you ensure your community has access to the best training, resources, and support we offer. Follow these steps today:

Visit our List Your Group page and follow the simple instructions there: 🔗 https://buynothingproject.org/listyourgifteconomy

Thank you for being part of something so important. Whether you are giving, asking, or building community, your participation makes the world more abundant every single day.

]]> Coming Soon: Buy Nothing 3.0 http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/coming-soon-buy-nothing-3 http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/coming-soon-buy-nothing-3?amp=true Wed, 14 Jan 2026 03:53:00 +0300 BNP Founders In just a few days, we’re launching the most significant upgrade in our history: Buy Nothing 3.0 - a reimagined, purpose-built platform designed to make your Buy Nothing experience more seamless, safe, and impactful than ever before.

Coming Soon: Buy Nothing 3.0

Big things are coming to Buy Nothing.

In just a few days, we’re launching the most significant upgrade in our history: Buy Nothing 3.0 - a reimagined, purpose-built platform designed to make your Buy Nothing experience more seamless, safe, and impactful than ever before.

This upgrade to the mobile and web app is built on the love and learning provided by our 14 million members across 50 countries. We’ve spent months turning your feedback into reality, building the tools you told us you needed most.

Whether you are a long-time app user or a Buy Nothing Facebook group member exploring a new way to participate, your new home for giving and receiving arrives on iOS, Android, and web by the end of the month.

What’s New

For every member: More features, still free.

The heart of the Buy Nothing experience will always be free and accessible to all. For our entire community, we focused on five ways we're making your gifting experience more personal, more rewarding, and much simpler.

Find what you need with a simple, easy interface: We redesigned everything so you can focus on connecting with neighbors, not figuring out how the app works. A completely new look and feel makes navigating your neighborhood Gives, Asks, and Gratitude a joy.

Join Private Communities: Now you can find and join private groups tailored to your neighborhood and interests for a curated experience - right on the Buy Nothing platform.

Simplify how you choose who gets your gift: No more digging through comments. When you post a Give, you’ll see a clear list of everyone interested, making it simple to choose a recipient and track your history.

Never miss out on what you want: Search by your favorite categories and post types, and set Gift Type filters to find exactly what you’re looking for.

Share globally or locally – or both: You will have the power to decide. Share your post with your immediate neighbors and/or reach out to the global community.

For subscribers: Powered by you

We don’t sell your data or clutter your feed with ads. Instead, we’re powered by you. With Buy Nothing 3.0, a subscription does more than just support our mission — it unlocks a new suite of personalization and community features designed to make sharing and connecting easier, in addition to the subscriber features you know and love. Thanks for keeping the gifting movement growing!

Host Private Communities: Build and host your own private sharing circles for your neighborhood, workplace, school, or extended family.

Label Your BN Life: Create custom labels for your saved locations (e.g., “Home,” “Work,” “Parent’s House”) to manage gifting across your daily routine.

Custom Radii: Save unique viewing distances for up to five different locations, so you only see what’s relevant to where you are.

This is Your Movement

We’ve come a long way since 2013. Together as a community, we’ve built a movement that’s changing how the world consumes. We hope Buy Nothing 3.0 matches the beauty of your generosity.

Buy Nothing 3.0 is our commitment to a future where community and re-use triumph over algorithms and consumerism. Whether you join us from a Facebook group or you've been with us since day one, we look forward to inviting you to step into this new experience.

Below are answers to some commonly asked questions about the launch and what it means for you. You’re welcome to reach out with any additional questions, and check back here for more information as we get closer to launch.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Questions? We have answers!

Buy Nothing 3.0

Q: When will Buy Nothing 3.0 be available?
A: Buy Nothing 3.0 should arrive this month. We’ll update you here as soon as we have the exact date. You can also stay tuned at https://buynothingapp.com/ for our announcements.

Q: How do I update my Buy Nothing account to 3.0?
A: Our web app at https://buynothingapp.com will automatically update. For your mobile device, you will need to update the app at the App Store for IOS and Google Play for Android.

Q: As a subscriber, can I host more than one Private Community?
A: Yes, you can host as many as you’d like.

Q: Can I be a member of many private communities?
A: Yes, but your membership is ultimately up to the Host of that community.

Q: What tools will a Host of a Buy Nothing private community have?
A: Hosts will have full control over member management and the ability to post "Tips" and reminders in your group. As a Host, you’ll be invited into the Buy Nothing Host Hub, a private, global circle run by our founding team to help you collaborate on best practices with Hosts worldwide.

Buy Nothing 3.0 and Facebook Groups

Q: I’m in a Buy Nothing Facebook Group. If I switch to the Buy Nothing app, will I still have access to my current Buy Nothing Facebook Group community?
A: Absolutely. Your Facebook group isn’t going anywhere as long as your local admins choose to keep it active. We have heard from many Group Admins who want to migrate their groups to the Buy Nothing platform. We’re working on tools to make that transition as seamless as possible. For all our Facebook Group members, we hope Buy Nothing 3.0 serves as expansion rather than a replacement of your Buy Nothing experience. We want you to build community wherever you feel most at home!

Q: Can I be on both the Buy Nothing app and in a Buy Nothing Facebook group?
A: Yes! You are welcome to participate in both at the same time. Many neighbors find that using both platforms helps them connect with more people.

Q: Can Buy Nothing Facebook groups exist simultaneously with Buy Nothing Private Communities?
A: Yes! Both can exist simultaneously. Since not everyone uses the same technology, we support both Facebook groups and Buy Nothing Private Communities to ensure no one is left out. We encourage you to use whichever—or both—suits your needs.

Q: How will you encourage longtime Facebook group users to try the Buy Nothing app? Is the idea to move everyone there?
A: Our goal isn’t to force a move, but to offer a better way to share. While we love the foundations we built on Facebook, the Buy Nothing app is purpose-built for gifting. We’re encouraging members to try it because it simplifies the experience with features Facebook Groups cannot offer, such as:

Smart Pickup Tools: Built-in maps and saved addresses and instructions to make local gifting seamless.
Easy Organization: Mark items as "Gifted" or "Fulfilled" instantly.
Custom Filtering: Browse by specific categories like Baby Gear, Electronics, or Clothing.
Wider Reach: Connect with your neighbors in all of your communities and your areas of interest.

Ultimately, we want to make giving and receiving as accessible as possible. Whether you stay on Facebook or join us on the app, we’re just happy you’re part of the movement.

The Buy Nothing Project

Q: What was behind the decision to build an independent platform?
A: After 8 years of building thousands of groups on Facebook, and hearing feedback from community members who write to our Help Desk, it was clear we needed to build a platform customized for the gift economy. Tens of thousands of people were not on Facebook and wanted to participate in Buy Nothing. Building a bespoke Buy Nothing experience had been our dream and labor of love.

Q: How is Buy Nothing funded?
A: The Buy Nothing Project started as a Facebook Group in 2013. In 2023, as a Public Benefit Corporation and funded by family, friends, and our community, we launched the first version of the Buy Nothing platform. Unlike traditional social media, we don't sell your data or display ads. Instead, we sustain the business through member subscriptions and donations. These funds allow us to maintain our apps, develop new features, and support our volunteer-led teams. This model ensures that The Buy Nothing Project remains a "gift to the world" that is owned by its mission, not by corporate interests.

]]> Buy Nothing 3.0 Launches Tomorrow! 🚀 http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/buy-nothing-launches-tomorrow http://docs.buynothingproject.org/tpost/buy-nothing-launches-tomorrow?amp=true Wed, 21 Jan 2026 19:31:00 +0300 BNP Founders This isn't just an update. We’ve rebuilt Buy Nothing from the ground up – to be more authentic, safer, and more personal. It's a completely new, reimagined home for the 14 million of us across 50 countries who are changing the way the world consumes.

Buy Nothing 3.0 Launches Tomorrow! 🚀

The big moment is almost here. On January 22, we're officially launching Buy Nothing 3.0.

This isn't just an update. We’ve rebuilt Buy Nothing from the ground up – to be more authentic, safer, and more personal. It's a completely new, reimagined home for the 14 million of us across 50 countries who are changing the way the world consumes.

Whether you're here to keep good stuff out of landfills, save money on everyday essentials, or know your neighbors better, we built 3.0 for you – and with you.

✨ What's New in 3.0

Refreshed Home Feed - Cleaner navigation makes it easier to focus on what matters to you—whether it's connecting with neighbors or finding what you need fast.

Filter by Gives vs. Asks - Instantly toggle between what's available and what people need - no more endless scrolling.

Interest Tracker - Choosing a recipient just got easier. See everyone interested in your Gift at a glance and track your giving history.

Private Communities - Finally! Join and create private groups tailored to your neighborhood and interests.

This is just the beginning. More is on the way to make it easier to participate—and grow this movement together.

⏰ Launch Timeline

To migrate everyone to the new platform, the app will be offline from 1am ET to 11am ET on January 22. We're working to bring it back sooner!

📱 What You Need to Do

Web Users (buynothingapp.com):

You're all set! Just refresh your browser tomorrow morning to see the new experience.

Mobile Users (Action Required):

Update your app manually via the App Store (iOS) or Google Play (Android) first thing tomorrow. Your account stays intact—you'll just verify a few settings when you log in.

🔗 Helpful Resources

Need help? → Help Center

First time here? → Download the app

Love 3.0? Found a bug? → Share your feedback

Media inquiries → Press Release

❤️ Let’s Keep the Movement Moving

As we launch 3.0, we're doubling down on our commitment to you. We built this by listening to thousands of you – your feedback shapes everything we do.

Buy Nothing is a Public Benefit Corporation, which means we prioritize people and the planet over profits. We don't sell your data. We don't run ads.

To stay independent and keep this platform alive, we rely on our Subscribing Members. If Buy Nothing has ever made you smile or helped you out, consider becoming a Subscribing Member. For less than a coffee and muffin per month, you can keep this platform free for everyone.

Become a Subscribing Member

See you in the new neighborhood tomorrow!

— The Buy Nothing Project Team

]]>