10 years of buy nothing
Project’s founders set out to help people and the planet
Words by Kevin Dwyer
Photo courtesy of the Buy Nothing Project
If you’ve scrolled the Internet looking for just about anything over the past several years, chances are you stumbled across the Buy Nothing Project, started a decade ago this year by two Bainbridge Island friends.
Simply put, Buy Nothing offers people a way to give, receive, share, lend and express gratitude through a global network of local gift-giving groups in which the true wealth is “the web of connections formed between people who are real-life neighbors,” says co-founder Rebecca Rockefeller. There’s no cost associated with participating—no subscribing, buying, selling, trading or any exchange of money. Although that could soon change.
Rockefeller, who grew up on Bainbridge, started the innovative online community with island buddy and fellow environmentalist, Liesl Clark, in 2013. It has since mushroomed into something of a worldwide phenomenon with more than 6.5 million members across the globe and 7,500-plus established communities located in 20 countries—run solely by volunteers (mostly women).
“We started the Buying Nothing Project in an effort to stave off pervasive plastics in every ecosystem on Earth by encouraging each of us to consume less and share more,” Rockefeller, 53, recounts. “We realized that much of the beachscape around us was washed-up plastics of every shape, color and size.”
Rockefeller met Clark while navigating the local Freecycle Network, another online platform where people can find and give away stuff to keep it out of the waste stream.
“She’s my best friend,” Rockefeller says of Clark. “We were constantly getting into trouble (on Freecycle) by giving away too many things and saying too much” in their posts.
With a degree in political economics and social change from The Evergreen State College, Rockefeller has held down a number of different jobs over the years. She's worked as a dental assistant and a kayaking guide in the San Juan Islands, a varied background that makes her uniquely qualified to launch and run the Buy Nothing Project, she says.
Over the past few years, the high-energy duo have scribed The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan (Atria Books) and launched an app that’s logged 650,000 downloads, a podcast, and a fundraising campaign to bolster their efforts.
After 10 years of starting up groups and growing a massive movement on nothing but the strength of their convictions, Rockefeller and Clark are looking to make the project financially sustainable and hire staff. Towards that end, they’ve registered the Buy Nothing Project as a for-profit benefit corporation and are considering introducing paid membership or subscription plans.
Clark has recently been busy meeting with angel investors and venture capital firms, including Kayak co-founder Paul English, to raise a round of seed funding. English has committed $100,000 to the venture, contigent upon the participation of a lead investor.
The financing is key in their effort to morph the grassroots gift-giving movement into a revenue-generating startup and app developer. It would also allow them to hire Silicon Valley entrepreneur and former Intuit executive Hugh Molotsi, who's considering joining the company as chief technology officer, and pay a dozen or so core volunteers located around the globe.
"We’re raising the funds so we can become a fully sustainable platform, generating revenue so we can finally pay our core volunteers for the work (nearly full time) that they do to support the over 7 million participants," Clark told Tideland via e-mail.
How the company will generate revenue remains to be seen. “We’re trying to figure out what our revenue (stream) will be,” Rockefeller told us. “None of these things are created yet, but we’re working towards all of them.”
In the meantime, tax-deductible donations to cover the group’s growing web hosting, cloud storage and other tech costs can be made at buynothingproject.org.
Additional reporting by Alorie Gilbert