Greetings from Rebecca Rockefeller and Liesl Clark!
We’ve been busy over the past 10 years! Our friendship is one that’s all about experimenting with ways to reach the masses about actions we can all take to reduce, reuse, rethink, retool, and refuse. We've met some incredible people who share our commitment to action through the Buy Nothing Project, Trash Backwards, Pioneering the Simple Life, Rockfarmer, and SOOP, and we're grateful for each of you.
We have some exciting things happening that we’d love to share with you. We’ve written a book that will be published by Atria of Simon & Schuster, due in bookstores on April 14, 2020!
This book is our offering to the world, a 7-step plan that can guide anyone, anywhere into embracing a gift economy lifestyle through easy and rewarding actions that can be put into practice in everyday life, no presence on Facebook required. We're offering a gift to everyone who preorders a copy before April 14th:
We will send you a hand-signed bookplate with both of our signatures and any personalization you request, to express our gratitude to you. Each bookplate will be a sticker custom-made for the book that you can place inside the cover or on the page of your choice. You can get all of the details here.
Pre-ordering a book is one of the best ways to show publishers that you support an author and their work. We were fortunate to find a partner in Atria Simon & Schuster, a publisher with the resources necessary to help us get this message further out into the world and offline, where many more people can harness the transformative power of gift economies and creative reuse. Person-to-person sharing and reuse has the power to change the world, and it can get us through our current pandemic. Our book is a timely blueprint for these difficult days we find ourselves in now and for whatever comes next.
To expand upon the ideas in our book, we've set up a discussion forum here on our new site, where we can all meet to chat about the Buy Nothing, Get Everything philosophy and concrete tips. Click here to join us, and bring your own pro-tips and wisdom to share with others around the world. This website also has our collection of Freesources, such as the shareable Buyerarchy image in our email. Keep an eye on this section for freely-given tools that can be used by anyone, anywhere, to build more resilient, connected, zero waste communities.
The Buy Nothing Project is moving one big step closer to our original vision - When we started this experiment, we wanted to find out how far we could extend access to local gift economies. Could we reach around the world, empowering people to connect with their neighbors to build interconnected networks of sharing that would see people through all of life’s challenges and celebrations? So far, by using Facebook’s Groups tools, the Buy Nothing Project has reached at least 1.35 million people in 32 countries around the world, helped by over 7,000 people who volunteer their time in service to their local Buy Nothing groups. This is astounding - considering we’re just 2 friends who came up with this wild-haired idea about hyper-local sharing while mom-ing our young kiddos - and we think it can reach even further. We’re taking several steps to make this an even more accessible movement: We’ve begun to transition more completely to an open-source model, in which all of our tools will be even more readily and publicly available for use by anyone who’d like to set up a Buy Nothing group for their neighborhood. This is our own gift to the world, making all of our resources as freely-available as possible, so they can be customized for each community’s needs. Watch our Buy Nothing Project website for these changes over the coming months!
Finally, if you’re as eager to leave Facebook as we are, we invite you to help us build SOOP (Share On Our Platform), an entire platform whose very architecture is designed to nourish the sharing of resources as well as stories. Visit soop.app to learn more about this new social media with a purpose endeavor of ours. We're making slow but steady progress towards our goal.
If you’d like to opt out of receiving updates about what we’re doing, please email us at buynothinggeteverything@gmail.com with "unsubscribe" in the subject line, and we'll promptly remove your email from our list! We're working on a more elegant unsubscribe option, but for now we're doing it the old-fashioned way, by hand. We hope to send this out about once each month, not to overwhelm your inbox! Yours in reuse and sharing, Liesl Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller
Co-Founders and Co-Volunteers with the Buy Nothing Project
