You’ve probably heard of the sharing economy. Housing services like Airbnb and ride-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft have exploded in popularity in recent years, helping property owners rent their guesthouses and spare rooms, and car owners rent their back seats (and their time behind the wheel). For many people, it’s an easy way to make extra money. For others, it can be a great way to cut the cost of lodging and avoid the inconvenience of taxis and mass transit.
Just one thing’s wrong with the sharing economy — nobody’s really sharing. Rooms and rides come at a cost. What these services really do is make it easy for buyers and sellers of spare rooms and rides to find each other and make the transaction. Unless we include the “share” taken by the service provider, where’s the sharing?
What you may not know is the Internet and smartphones have made the other kind of sharing easier, too. In this case, actual sharing. You know, people pooling their resources — everything from lawn mowers to backyard peaches — and sharing them with each other at no cost, because it’s the neighborly thing to do.
Intrigued? Here are some ideas about how to set up a sharing economy in your own neighborhood.
1. Join a website built for sharing.
One popular neighborhood sharing site is NeighborGoods. It’s a robust site with lots of features to help you find neighbors with stuff to lend (or borrow), message one another, keep track of shared inventory and even facilitate payment if you’d rather rent than lend. One nice feature is “Groups,” which allows you to form sharing associations beyond your neighborhood — the families involved in your daughter’s softball league, perhaps, or your co-workers from the office. If you’re reluctant to share with everybody, you can keep sharing private among the group or private among you and one or two other individuals.
2. Join a website built for community.
While Nextdoor is not specifically designed to make sharing with your neighbors easier, the site’s messaging and blogging tools make it easy. In less than a week of perusing one Nextdoor neighborhood site, locals borrowed a walker and a stroller from one another, found a baby-sitter on short notice and kept abreast of announcements from local authorities about street closures and sidewalk maintenance.
3. Take advantage of social media.
Venerable Facebook is also a possibility. Because most of your neighbors are probably already on the social media giant, encouraging them to join a Facebook group dedicated to your neighborhood should be easy. From there, it’s easy to start sharing.
4. Start a lending library.
Another option, one that might kick-start a wider sharing project and help your neighbors come around to the idea, is a Little Free Library. After a visit to the website to learn how to set up your own library, you can start sharing books among your neighbors. The startup kit comes with an official Little Free Library sign, and you can register yours on the site, so it’ll be easy for others to find. It won’t be long before other book lovers in your neighborhood begin adding their favorite reads to your library’s rotating collection, too.
5. Create or join a backyard produce network.
Got an orange tree that produces more oranges than you know what to do with? Overwhelmed with an abundance of avocadoes? If so, there’s a good chance your neighbor with the apple tree is likewise burdened with too much fruit. Exchange your bounty, and widen the network to all the home gardeners in your neighborhood. Similar to NeighborGoods, The Farmer’s Garden seeks to connect neighborhood backyard gardeners everywhere and facilitate produce exchange. But you can take advantage of other online services to do the same thing.
Going a step further, locavore restaurant Forage in Southern California has created a network of backyard growers to supply its café and catering business. In exchange for their fruits and vegetables, participating growers earn credits for meals at the restaurant.
Overcoming the Distrust Factor
Sharing is hard, and the hardest part may be getting enough of your neighbors involved to make it worthwhile. When you consider how readily we place our trust in complete strangers via services like Airbnb and Uber, it seems strange that we are so reluctant to make the same connection with our neighbors. For a sharing network to work, it needs lots of members with stuff to share, and who are willing to trust one another.
One solution may be to form a sharing group with an affinity group of people who already trust one another, such as a local children’s sports league or your school’s PTA.
Another might be to begin small — with books or backyard fruit. After you’ve developed some trust, and some communication and administrative skills to manage inventory and exchange, you’ll be ready to expand your sharing network to tools and maybe even services, such as child care and errand running.
You’ll save money and time, of course, but best of all, you’ll have built a strong community of like-minded sharers.
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How to Set Up a Neighborhood Sharing Network originally appeared on usnews.com