At first, “Buy Nothing Appleton (North)” looks like any other buy-sell-trade Facebook group.
Membership is restricted to residents of Appleton’s city limits north of the Fox River. Otherwise, joining is a simple process involving a Facebook request and only three questions.
The group’s feed is a cascade of posts from members of the community. Some are posting goods and services they have: children’s clothes, free photography sessions, home décor, baby toys.
Others ask for things or services they want or need: leftover landscaping rocks, freezer pops, air-conditioning units, help doing household tasks.
Within a week, these requests had all been fulfilled. The difference is that, in this group, no one had paid a cent.
And there are seven more groups like it in Appleton and the surrounding communities, over 60 groups in Wisconsin, and over 7,000 worldwide.
What is the Buy Nothing Project?
The Buy Nothing Project, a self-described “hyperlocal gift economy,” is a grassroots, volunteer-run organization that aims to provide a means for people to reduce waste and get what they need by asking and giving to their neighbors.
Buy Nothing echoes other thrifty practices: curb alerts, hand-me-down baby clothes, rhubarb and zucchini left in the break room, the proverbial cup of sugar from a neighbor. But the movement aims to expand the way people think about giving and receiving to the point where buying less can become a way of life.
The Buy Nothing Project’s origin story starts with a 2011 winter trip to a beach on the Salish Sea in Washington, according to founders Rebecca Rockefeller and Liesl Clark in their book “The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan.”
As the two mothers walked barefoot in the sand with their children, they noticed plastic trash washed upon the shore: pens, balloons, baby toys. Some of these items reminded Clark and Rockefeller of things they themselves had thrown away.
This inspired them to reconsider how they used plastic and how much they discarded. Their solution was to create a community where members could meet their needs without having to go to the store.
The first Buy Nothing group started on Facebook for residents of Bainbridge Island, Washington, in 2013, according to the book. Since then, Buy Nothing groups on Facebook have sprung up across the globe, spreading to 44 countries.
How did Buy Nothing start in Appleton? One person at a time
Sarah Scanlan, an Appleton resident and environmental health specialist for the state of Wisconsin, is passionate about protecting the environment and using natural resources wisely.
“I’m a big believer that we have enough things in the world already created,” Scanlan said.
In 2019, Scanlan’s interest led her to a training session the Buy Nothing Project held for starting new groups. Through this training, she met James Bacon, an educational technology business owner who serves on the Appleton School Board.
At the time, Bacon had recently moved to the Fox Cities from Boston. He’d participated in Buy Nothing groups on the East Coast, and when he saw that Appleton didn’t have a group, he wanted to start one.
Bacon and Scanlan co-founded Appleton’s first Buy Nothing group in July 2019. They grew the group “one by one” to start, Scanlan said, recruiting friends, family and community members and teaching them how to post in the group.
“Once we got to 100, 200 (members), it had just taken off,” Bacon said. He noted that many of the first group members were excited to tell their friends and neighbors about Buy Nothing once they joined.
Since then, Buy Nothing has established itself in the wider community. Not only has the original Appleton group grown to over 1,000 members and started a newer group south of the Fox River, similar Buy Nothing groups have also sprung up in nearby communities like Greenville, Little Chute and Neenah. All together, over 3,000 people in the Appleton area are members of Buy Nothing groups, and that number is growing.
How does Buy Nothing work? Three words: Give, ask, gratitude
In order to join a Buy Nothing group, members must be at least 18 or 21 years old, depending on the group. Members are also asked to join only one group local to them. Once you’re in, you can make three types of posts: “give,” “ask” and “gratitude.”
When members make “give” posts, they are encouraged to “give from their own abundance” without expecting any reward, according to the Buy Nothing Project’s official guidelines. Members can offer gifts of items, time and service.
“Ask” posts are requests for goods or services, either to borrow or to keep. No ask is too big or small, whether it’s for a quarter cup of oil, help moving a couch or assistance in furnishing a new home.
Finally, “gratitude” posts express thanks for the gift received. Martha Arlart, a member of the northern Appleton group, said she receives pictures of her kids’ outgrown clothes being given a second life.
“It’s really neat to see (the clothes) going directly to another kid who is having an awesome time wearing them,” Arlart said.
As long as no exchange of money is involved or suggested — job postings, bartering, requests for monetary donations, crowdfunding campaigns and advertising are all banned — Buy Nothing group members are encouraged to be creative and inclusive with how they give and receive.
‘It makes our neighborhood bigger’
Saving money and resources, however, are only two parts to the picture. Many Buy Nothing group members talked about how the groups helped them get to know their neighbors better.
For Xitlali Moore, an admin for a Buy Nothing group on Appleton’s south side, Buy Nothing was an “extremely helpful” way to make connections with others after she first moved to Appleton, she said. Moore has found friends through her Buy Nothing group, including someone who first came over to her house to borrow some jigsaw puzzles.
And when a Buy Nothing group member can give someone directly what they need, the benefits outweigh whatever money they might have made by simply reselling the item, as Robert Clothier found.
“It makes our neighborhood bigger,” he said. Clothier described how he found an extra can of premium gas while cleaning his garage, then gave it away to a neighbor who asked for one in the Buy Nothing group that same night, saying, “There are some pretty cool connections that can be made.”
Outside of the Buy Nothing group and its boundaries, several of the group’s members have also held large events in the same spirit of giving freely to neighbors.
Last fall, Christina Leone Tracy got together donations from neighbors and put everything in her yard free for the taking, though she kept out a donation jar for the Fox Valley Literacy Council.
“The hardest part of a yard sale is pricing everything,” Leone Tracy said.
By removing the barrier of cost, however, she and her neighbors were able to offload large numbers of items and get them to people who needed them, she said, such as new mothers in a local high school or kids in foster care.
Clothier said that he held a similar sale over Memorial Day weekend, putting six neighbors’ extra household items on his lawn and inviting the public to take the items and pay whatever they wished for them. He then donated all proceeds to UNICEF’s Ukraine fund.
After Clothier was finished with the “sale”, he posted the UNICEF signs in his Buy Nothing group so that another group member could hold a similar event. A neighbor expressed interest in the signs within an hour.
Buy Nothing is not only ‘a beautiful thing,’ it’s also efficient
Because Buy Nothing groups operate independently, it’s difficult to define the project’s success by numbers. For example, the organization doesn’t track how much money Buy Nothing members save or how many tons of greenhouse gases the groups keep out of the atmosphere.
However, the Buy Nothing Project isn’t just based upon saving money or using fewer resources. Instead, it’s meant to cultivate a mindset of buying something new as a last resort for meeting a household’s needs.
And, as prices of food and goods rise, the Buy Nothing Project might have found a way to meet those needs more efficiently, according to Hillary Caruthers, an assistant professor of economics at Lawrence University and a participant in an Appleton Buy Nothing group.
“As an economist, (Buy Nothing) is a beautiful thing,” Caruthers said. “Without producing anything new, we’ve created value and happiness by distributing goods.”
She described how she made her father-in-law a mincemeat pie — his favorite — using jars of mincemeat filling she received from a gift post in the Buy Nothing group.
Caruthers also said Buy Nothing has advantages even over thrift stores by reducing the time and effort it takes to meet wants and needs. She added she believes Buy Nothing could reduce “the collective strain on natural resources” as more people get involved with the groups.
The secret to running a Buy Nothing group? Education
The decentralized nature of the Buy Nothing Project means that “every group has its own culture,” according to Leone Tracy. Individual communities and admins play the biggest roles in these groups’ successes and failures.
Bacon said running the group takes some work, especially at first, partly because Buy Nothing groups are “a little different than how we as a society normally operate.”
“The asking was something that (James and I) really had to model,” Scanlan said, saying that American culture in general has difficulty asking for something, especially when the item costs them nothing.
Over time, Bacon said, he’s found that enforcing the rules and guidelines within the group often means taking the time to educate group members. He and Scanlan do this within the group through the hashtag #AdminTips.
Bacon and Scanlan also spent time helping other area admins, too. They said they’ve helped groups start in Neenah, Grand Chute and Fox Crossing, and that many of the admins for area Buy Nothing groups remain in touch with other.
What’s next for area Buy Nothing groups?
Bacon’s hopes for the future of Buy Nothing are simple: “The more people I think it touches, the better.”
For her part, Scanlan plans to give from the extra harvest in her garden this summer — she already offered chives, chamomile and radishes to her Buy Nothing group in June. She also hopes that, eventually, the Buy Nothing group will be able to hold more events in person so that the community-building aspect of the group can grow.
The Buy Nothing Project is rolling out an app for iOS and Android, and a Buy Nothing group in Oshkosh already has based their community on this app. However, in Appleton, many groups are much more active on Facebook for now.
Find a group
Click here to enter your address and find a Buy Nothing group in your neighborhood, or use the map below.
Rebecca Loroff covers morning breaking news for the USA-Today Network-Wisconsin. Contact her at 920-907-7801 or [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter at @RebeccaLoroff.
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