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I’ve blogged before about shared ownership of cars and car clubs, but saw these articles on shareable.net: How to share a car, part 1 and How to share a car part 2. The articles are written by Janelle Orsi the author of a new book The Sharing Solution . The first part broadly covers car clubs, in the UK these are operated by companies like Zipcar, Connect by Hertz and CityCarClub. The second part covers informal car clubs, where a small group (say two to six) private individuals own a car. I’m pleases that , wrote these articles cover this, because I think this is a great way forward, particularly for rural and small town commnities where the major car clubs are unlikely to operate, and where there are often severe transport issues. However few people appear to even cosider owning a car with people who live nearby. Part 2 also covers carpooling or liftsharing: in the UK the major operator is Liftshare.
Another great source of information about car sharing is Carplus and this recent report by Frost and Sullivan on the sustainable potential of carsharing is worth a read.
yours2share has some great guidance on car clubs and car sharing and here are the current car sharing listings
When I started yours2share, I didn’t realise that I was starting a social enterprise, I just wanted to help people share stuff. As the number of private syndicates that were helped by yours2share increased, I also became aware that if as the number of partners in a private syndicates increases substantially, it becomes a co-operative.
Over time yours2share has created a well established forum for people sharing property, boats and aircraft. It also enables people to share land, gardens and allotments, for food and vegetables as well as animals such as hens, goats, horses, and bees. We’ve also helped people to share cars as informal car clubs: buying a car between three and six people in a street or village. The principles of sharing, the issues that must be agreed to make a sharing arrangment work are basically the same, whether you are sharing a £1 million yacht or a vegetable plot at the end of the garden.
The last year I moved to a small town in south Norfolk, a rural corner of East Anglia and I’ve become immersed in a rural lifestyle and economy. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been using the social networks much more, particularly Twitter, and all of the strands of yours2share and my lives, seem to have come together in the guise of the Plunkett Foundation and various projects in which it is involved.
The Plunkett Foundation promotes and supports co-operatives and social enterprises in rural communities worldwide. One of the Plunkett Foundation’s projects is the lottery funded MakeLocalFoodWork, where it works with a range of other major partners including Co-operativesUK, the trade association for all types of co-operative enterprise throughout the UK, and the Soil Association which works to improve the public’s understanding of the impact of different methods of food production on health and the environment.
The MakeLocalFoodWork project is a collection of projects all designed to ‘reconnect people and land through local food increasing access to fresh, healthy, local food with clear, traceable origins’.
If you want to know more about supporting rural communities, do visit the Plunkett Foundation’s website, and if food issues interest you, have a look at the MakeLocalFoodWork website.
If you just want somewhere to “grow your own” or would like someone to help you to make use of your garden, here are yours2share’s landshare listings and landshare guidance.
Do you share a house, car, motorhome, boat, aircraft dog, horse or anything else? I’m always looking for examples of sharing in action to blog about on yours2share and, if they are really good and two or more partners are willing to be interviewed, for case studies. If you are happy to tell me about your experiences, good or bad, I’ll blog about you and include a link to your website.
Examples could be straightforward: you own a quarter of a boat, a fifth of a light aircraft, half a motorhome. Or maybe your daughter goes to someone’s house to practice on their piano, or you swim in someone’s pool for an hour once a week. Maybe you rent a room from Monday to Friday because you are working away from home, or you’ve found someone to ride your horse on Tuesday and Thursday in return for some mucking out. It could be that you’ve found someone to help sort out the vegetable patch you’ve neglected for years, so you get a quarter of the produce, or you’ve found someone who is happy to look after a dog during the week when you are at work, so your children can now have the dog they have been pestering you for.
There are so many ways of sharing: nearly everyone does it they just don’t realise it. And they could do so much more.
Contact me here, or via my twitter account.
yours2share gets mentions and links from many and varied forum posts, but I had to have a look at this forum when I saw the link on the stats pages: PigeonWatch. The forum entry is actually about sharing allotments, but I was intrigued to find this forum devoted to pigeon shooting. With nearly a million posts this is a thriving forum.
As the post indicates, yours2share has lots of ads for land sharing (garden sharing or allotment sharing) as well as guidance.
This article about rental websites in the Boston Globe came to my attention today. I’m pleased to find out about a few more rental websites, I knew about Rentalic but there are several mentioned that I hadn’t heard about before.
As the article says:
But the biggest challenge may be cultural. Americans are accustomed to having many possessions – it is a sign of status and identity, and we take the convenience of constant access for granted. In the United States, notes Michael Braungart, one of the concept’s pioneers, “You don’t want to use something that someone else used before.”
This is the biggest challenge, and I don’t think things will alter over night, but there are signs that people are considering the alternatives to owning one of everything, even if you rarely use it, and even if it means you can only buy and use a poor quality items.
yours2share is playing a part, enabling people to find like-minded partners for long term sharing arrangements, by owning jointly or renting part time.
I read with interest this post on the monbiot blog I’ve recently discovered about an interview with Lord Turner in the Guardian. Lord Turner is the head of the Financial Services Authority and is quoted as saying: “All the evidence shows that beyond the sort of standard of living which Britain has now achieved, extra growth does not automatically translate into human welfare and happiness.”
For the last 50 odd years we all appear to have been enslaved to the view that the only true measure of success is growth. Growth of individual companies, the stock market, the economy is taken to mean growth in our standard of living and our happiness. In the last 20 years it has become increasingly obvious that once you get to a certain level, this isn’t so. One can only consume so much.
On a small scale, I had become aware that something was out of kilter in my own life. I run a local networking group for women (WIRE – Women in Rural Enterprises). All the literature and emphasis of the national bodies tend to focus on conditions for growth of small businesses. But speaking to a great many owners of small businesses, most simply want to achive a certain level and stay there, or maintain the perfect level they have already attained. Many don’t want to employ staff: they just want to take people on contract when they need them. Growth beyond a specific point simply means that they no longer have time for their family or the rest of their life, and why would they consider trading this for money they don’t actually need and can’t actually spend, because they no longer have the time.
In yours2share world, the increase in sharing and private syndicates is further evidence that people are shifting from the long held view that ownership is king. People are starting to consider only buying what they need. At the same time, many syndicate owners also get to own part of a better asset than they would enjoy if they bought outright. As sharing becomes more established, people will also realise that the community of like-minded syndicate partners is a further benefit.
I think that once you have reached the standard of living that Britain has now achived, the route to greater human welfare and happiness is about strengthening communities and environmental harmony. Sharing has a role in this.
This post on the sharing solution caught my eye: New App for Cab Sharing Could Help Travelers Share and Save.
I’m reminded of many years ago (long before yours2share time) when I used to stagger back on Friday night to south west London after a night out in town. I often caught the last train to Surbiton, which arrived about 1am, the last train to the place I actually lived left ridiculously early in the evening. Then I had to take a cab the last four miles. It cost about £5, but that didn’t bother me much, the main problem was most of south west London also used this train. It was the best way of getting back late at night to that part of the capital. So at 1am, there would often be a queue of a 100 people, and although the taxi drivers knew there were rich picking to be had, there were never enough.
After spending an hour or so waiting a couple of times, there came a time when, fueled by a particularly large helping of wine, I shouted from the back of a very long queue, “is anyone going to Thames Ditton or beyond?” Suddenly sense prevailed. I joined up with two or three other people and I was in a cab a few minutes later. Behind me, I could hear “anyone going to Esher?” “I’m going to Weybridge..” “Walton anyone?”. From then on, whenever I arrived at this queue, I just asked the question and each time it would start the same chain reaction.
As far as the taxi driver was concerned, they always seemed to do well. Everyone was expecting to pay the fare themselves, so any reduction was good news, so often people would put far more in than the actual proportion of the fare required. Tips were always substantial. What I call a win, win, win!
So the question is, how to get people to think about sharing?
Someone on my wavelength! I feel like yelling from the rooftops!
This post on shareable.net about non profit organisations sharing to cut costs is one (of many) areas that I’ve always thought yours2share could easily facilitate: resources and services used by organisations. And yet most people don’t even consider this, unless they know people well in the other organisation or unless the economic drivers are very high. In the former category, I know that health authorities often share resources and in the latter, I’m told that oil companies pool together to buy the most expensive spare parts rather than all carry one each of a part that rarely fails. I’ve written a lengthy comment on the above post, so please read this if you want to find out more of my views.
In the article Janelle Orsi is only talking about not for profit organsiations, but I think profit making organisations can also get together to share. The article above is actually the second of two parts. The first part expands on the types of things that organisations could share.
If anyone wants to share accomodation, space, equipment, services or anything else with another organisation, please contact me and I’ll help work out exactly where to post the ad on yours2share and I’ll also work hard to publicise the request.
Two websites have come to my attention recently that make me feel optimistic about the future, because both websites are so positive about how we can work together and make all kinds of ordinary things in life better. In many respects they share the same values as yours2share. The first is the Plunkett Foundation and the well named Optimist World.
The Plunkett Foundation helps rural communities to tackle a range of problems they face by working with co-operatives and social enterprises. I’ve signed up for the newsletter and, although it is lengthy, sometimes my attention-span would prefer shorter bite-sized items, it is always interesting.
The wonderfully named Optimist World is dedicated to taking a daily look on the bright side and many of the sections of the website relate to companies, charities and people working together and sharing ideas and items.
Another website I’ve been following called Inspired Times – see my previous blog post - has a similar objective to Optimist World.
Yet another article about how to design for social cohesion on shareable.net’s excellent website has got me thinking.
I’ve always hated the stupidity of planners’ love of zoning: separating work, home, retail and play so that everyone has to travel to do the basic things of life. This has created suburban mazes where to only winner is the car manufacturer. In one of my previous lives I was a public transport market researcher working with public transport engineers and economists, and we saw people trying to find public transport solutions to ridiculous traffic congestion caused by planning idiocy. This zonal approach has had many dismal effects including a reduction in social cohesion caused by isolation, and the environmental and social (time wasted) dis-benefits of commuting and having to drive to achieve anything.
I’ve long been the odd one of my friends: choosing to take the train or bus if it is easier. And although I know live in deepest rural Norfolk (UK), where you really do need to own a car, I live in the centre of a small town. London friends who come and visit are quietly impressed by the fact that my butcher, supermarket, doctor, dentist, pharmacy and lost more are all a few doors away. Opposite is the bus to Norwich which takes 20 minutes. I do have a car, but I don’t use it much. As a result, we are quickly getting to know the people who live around us, and we’ve only been here three months. When I travel to London, which I do once or twice a month, I use the train. It’s very civilised: I lots of work done, or read the paper, or sleep, or chat to other passengers. You can’t do this in the car.
I hadn’t until today really linked my irritation with the reliance on the car and wish for social cohesion, to my strong instinctive wish to encourage as much sharing as possible. But I realise that it is the same pull to greater social cohesion. Every syndicate member I ever speak to tells me about the great community, shared responsibility, good buddies with a love of the same boat/car/horse/whatever. Sharing, even in small private syndicates, creates communities. By encouraging private syndicates, yours2share is creating communities and doing its bit for greater social cohesion.
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