Share & Share Alike: How to share everything from pets and nannies to real estate
By Susan Pederson
For Avenue Magazine
Illustrations by Isabelle Cardinal
03/24/2009 – 14:06
Sharing is one of the first lessons we teach children, and yet for adults, it’s looked upon with more than a bit of skepticism. Why share when we can buy our own? But, as many are discovering, sharing not only lowers costs for rarely used items, it can decrease waste and build community.
“These days, if I went to my neighbour and asked to borrow a cup of sugar, they would look at me like I had three heads,” says Sean Young, a Calgary entrepreneur and the president of BorrowMe, a website where people from all over the world borrow items from other people within certain groups that the individual user establishes (such as trust networks, neighbourhood affiliations and so on).
Young aims to override our collective reticence about sharing and borrowing with BorrowMe, which was launched as a study in 2006 and will relaunch later this year.
“When we did our research originally, we looked at the social sharing movement,” says Young. “It encapsulates everything from car pooling to open-source software, and is becoming a really big social phenomenon.”
Young describes our society as weighed down by “stuffocation” — debt-ridden and overwhelmed with personal possessions, where we no longer need our neighbours for anything. Instead, if we need a rake twice a year for the yard, we drive to the big-box store and buy the latest and greatest. If we are short an egg for a muffin recipe, we wait until we do the weekly Costco run or zip down to the corner store, instead of asking a neighbour for one.
– Sean
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