The U.S. Moneyless Economy Is Booming

In the localized gift economy that can start to form, people begin to source materials within what is called a circular economy.

“You keep those items circling throughout the community, which means that you are connecting with each other,” she says. ​“The stuff is right there, but in order to get the stuff and to perpetuate this culture of reuse, you’re actually also getting to know your neighbors.”

Clark says the project was the co-founders’ way of taking action toward a solution to stave off waste.

“There’s: ​‘reduce, reuse, recycle,’ and with this we were thinking, how about just ​‘refuse,’” she says. ​“Before you go out and buy that thing, especially that plastic thing, consider asking your neighbor for it.”

Clark points out that rather than each household needing to own its own individual garden tools, camping gear, lawn mower, baking supplies, and so on, neighbors within a community could be sharing these items. Chances are that the tools or other resources we need to perform any given task are available right down the street.

“Someone might have some cake pans that they can loan out to you for that baking project,” she says. ​“We don’t have to outfit all of our homes with exactly the same stuff. We can actually connect with each other and borrow those things. I have someone coming over to borrow some camping gear soon, for example.”

Over the years, Buy Nothing has been gaining popularity — not through any marketing on the part of the organization but through word-of-mouth and organic growth, Clark shares — with about 7.5 million people around the world participating in their local Buy Nothing Facebook group; as of 2023, there were 7,500 of these social media-centered community branches, and counting. The Buy Nothing app, which has only been around for about two years, is also zeroing in on 1 million users, and Clark says it is getting about 1,500 new users a day through just organic growth, without any marketing.

During the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, Clark shares, Buy Nothing’s community groups just about tripled — likely due to the economic effects of the pandemic as well as the level of isolation people experienced through lockdown and distancing practices.

“We found in the pandemic that Buy Nothing could really strike a chord with people who were even more isolated [than many already are in our society],” Clark says. ​“So sharing with neighbors was a way to bring us out of our isolation, without having to have physical contact with them. You could go to someone’s front door without actually having to connect in person, and people were connecting online.”

Buy Nothing’s model varies from that of Craigslist’s ​“free stuff” and Freecycle in that it is focused on community groups, gatherings, and events organized by and for local communities around the world. The idea is that a global reuse economy will emerge community by community.

The reason Buy Nothing exists, according to its website, is ​“to build resilient communities where our true wealth is the connections forged between neighbors.”

Clark notes that many people, in communities everywhere, already participate in Buy Nothing-style gift economies without the digital media aspect, which is something she and Rockefeller discuss in their book, The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan: Discover the Joy of Spending Less, Sharing More, and Living Generously.

“We are really trying to promote people to meet more face to face, person to person, and doing community meetups, and just generally incorporating that giving, asking, gratitude into everyday life,” Clark says. ​“So for example, if you’ve got excess produce, just keep it in the back of your car. You might run into some neighbors and be able to gift it.”

Clark shared that one part of the inspiration for starting Buy Nothing came from visiting Nepal, where she and her family witnessed the kind of community resilience that emerges in villages that have no nearby stores.

“In those villages, what you have in your community is literally what you have for your survival, unless you’re going to take a walk for four or five days to the nearest place of commerce — and even that isn’t going to get you much,” she says. ​“Whatever is brought into the community is used and reused, shared and repaired, fixed and upcycled so that it benefits everyone, in a sense.”

For its first 10 years, Buy Nothing was funded solely through donations from friends, family, and supporters with Clark working on the project full time, Rockefeller part time, and others helping out on a volunteer basis.

The funding has gone into the upkeep of the website and the creation of the app tools. In July 2023, Buy Nothing launched a ​“2.0” version of the project, created with the help of volunteer developers, which includes an option for members to subscribe and become a ​“sustaining member” of Buy Nothing and access extra features in return. Among the new subscription-only features is the option to save multiple locations within the app, so if someone wants to use the app while traveling, or at work, as well as in their home community, that process is more streamlined.

“Until just a handful of days ago [before July 2023], we had been funded by friends and family, and we launched a supporter strand where the Buy Nothing community could also kick in to support, because as we grow, whether it’s on Facebook or on our own platform, our costs go up,” Clark says, noting that at first she and Rockefeller were covering those costs out-of-pocket. Even with community support donations, running the project ad-free while bearing the overhead expenses was becoming untenable, hence the new launch of the 2.0 app. Within days of the 2.0 launch, Clark shared that subscriptions were already flowing in.

“Resoundingly, people are indicating, ​‘yes, if you build it, we’ll support this,’ because I think people recognize that this is labor they want to help pay for,” Clark says. ​“Everybody [on the Buy Nothing team is] still a volunteer, but this is helping us cover the costs of running an independent platform with no advertising, and where we don’t ever sell people’s private data… we’re super excited because this looks like a really viable business model… and now we’re just going to start rolling out more and more features for both the free app and for the subscription model.”

She says over the last decade many serendipitous and unexpected things have come out of Buy Nothing communities — including some ​“crazy things you wouldn’t imagine could have happened.” For instance, there was a woman who lost her wedding ring in her garden, and then one day almost a decade later decided to reach out to her neighbors through Buy Nothing and ask around to borrow a metal detector.

“She shared something like, ​‘I have a general sense of where I may have lost my diamond ring, but I’ve never been able to find it,’” Clark says.

A neighbor did have a metal detector, and the ring was recovered, buried almost a foot down under the dirt in the woman’s garden.

“These gift economies are open and transparent in that everyone gets to look in on what’s happening,” Clark says. ​“It’s sort of voyeuristic in that you don’t even have to participate in the sense of giving, asking, and sharing your gratitude. You can just look on and observe, and I promise you’re going to feel really great when you see the connections being made, and problems being solved, and people’s needs and wants being met.”

Just as there’s no obligation to participate, there’s no obligation to reciprocate or feel guilty about asking for or taking what you need in the group. One of the stated guidelines of Buy Nothing and its community groups is to ​“give freely,” ​“without any expectation of reward or another gift in return.”

This article was produced via Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute.