How often do we end up buying something we only need to use once or twice?
Wouldn’t it be great if you could just borrow it from a neighbour? Problem is most of us don’t know our neighbours well enough to ask if we even know them at all . But that’s where Friends with Things steps in – it’s a place where you can borrow and share things with your neighbours for free and you can share more than just ‘things’, you can also share your time, expertise or knowledge.
This sharing often leads to a connection with your neighbours and chance at making new friends. Iit can really help bring back that sense of neighbourhood that’s so often missing from apartment complexes, city living and suburban sprawl. It’s a small way we can help each other and start to make our communities the friendlier, safer happier places we’d all like to live in.
Sharing like this is called ‘collaborative consumption’ – and it has another really important benefit: the more we share the less we consume, so there’s a huge environmental benefit. If you think that about it, our houses are full of things we only ever use now and again – from power drills, to camping gear; consider the huge environmental cost of manufacturing them, the fossil fuel and energy used in moving them around the world – not to mention the cost of buying them.
Rachel Botsman and Roo Rodgers authors of “What’s mine is YOURs” give us this startling statistic about the household drill – the average power drill is used between 7 and 13 minutes over its entire lifetime and there are around 50 million drills currently sitting idle in people’s homes today.
With Friends with Things you don’t have to buy it, you can borrow it instead. It’s a small, simple and very effective way of doing something positive for the environment.
Best of all Friends with Things is free and always will be – it’s community based and run by volunteers. It’s also really easy to use, if you’re on-line – you can be sharing in under a minute.
Every time someone borrows something of mine I make a new friend. I think about how many times that’s happening around Australia each week because of the site – that’s a lot of people making new friends, and doing their little bit for the environment at the same time.
Friends with Things has shown me one thing – people are more reliable, honest and trustworthy than we give them credit for. In all the time I’ve been doing this I’ve not had one bad experience. When you read the papers or watch the news on TV it’s easy to believe the worst about people, but it’s simply not true. If you want to have your faith in people restored, Friends with Things is a good place to start.
I’ve also discovered that sharing really can make you happy.
The project is still new and still just beginning and it would be great to have a few more people join in and help us along, so please come and visit the site, say hello and maybe share something and make a new friend yourself – you’ll find the site at www.friendswiththings.com.au
You’re also welcome to get in touch with me if you have any thoughts or ideas about the site, I can always do with good advice and feedback – I’m at friendswiththings@gmail.com
Top Comments
Another great site I just discovered is called Open Shed (www.openshed.com.au) it also helps you make the most of the stuff you have by renting it out to others, or you can rent rather than buy!
They have also really thought about trust and safety on the site too.
This article reminded me of the time my next-door-neighbour came round to borrow a mop and bucket as he wanted to clean up after a party before his wife came back from a weekend away. My ex answered the door and yelled out to ask me where we kept ours. The neighbour admitted they had their own but he too had no idea where it was kept (turned out both were in the respective cupboards under the stairs - I know, very illogical place to keep such things). Part of the reason the ex is the ex!
We have a couple of mates with power tools who lend to us now and then - we just can't justify the expense of buying things that we hardly ever use, but what we do offer in return are babysitting (me) and help with heavy building work (hubby).
We have made an effort to get to know our neighbours as we intend to be in our house for a few years yet and our new babies will have each other to play with. We share a driveway which has to be repaved very soon so hubby and the neighbour have agreed to put in the work to do it themselves rather than pay to get it done. A few years ago I wouldn't have been bothered about getting to know the people next door, but having a family and being more settled means it's become more important to us.