The BuyNothing App will officially debut on Bainbridge Island, Washington this morning. The small and tight-knit island community is where the international Buy Nothing Project began more than 8 years ago as a neighborhood social experiment. The Buy Nothing movement has since grown exponentially to more than 4 million participants globally, across 44 countries. The BuyNothing app’s debut on Bainbridge Island today will be the first of eight hyperlocal rollouts scheduled this summer as part of the BuyNothing App’s beta release process.
ShareThing, Inc., the company behind the BuyNothing app, is scheduled to make the app more broadly available to the global Buy Nothing Project community in a few months. The founders of ShareThing, a team including Liesl Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller – the co-founders of the Buy Nothing Project – seek to make the app a more equitable and inclusive alternative to the current limited avenues for engagement with the global and rapidly growing movement.
In describing what Buy Nothing Project loyalists and new participants alike can expect from the app’s user experience, ShareThing co-founder and Head of Product, Lucas Rix said, “Not much! 🙂 Our beta app is functionally minimal, as are most beta launches. But we now have in place a foundation that, with the help of our community members, we will purposefully shape and evolve into a truly inviting, safe, and wonderful place for people to share with one another.”
The ShareThing team is advised by a truly diverse and world-class team of expert advisors including members of the Global Buy Nothing Project Volunteer Leadership Team, senior executives, technical experts, and legal and strategic advisors from leading firms and technology companies like Lyft, Google, FiscalNote, and Huge. Advisors include a world-leading machine learning and artificial intelligence professor (data equity strategy) and the Director of the COVID-19 Testing Task Force for a high-profile U.S. state (strategic operations).
The Buy Nothing Project community has grown by a third since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The ShareThing team looks forward to helping promote and steward continued exponential growth across the movement with the help of the app. Asked about the app’s debut, ShareThing co-founder and Co-CEO, Tunji Williams said: “We look forward to telling the Buy Nothing story to millions of new participants from across the globe, in communities in every corner of the world. We are building our values into this product out of love for a community that continues to make the Buy Nothing project a shining example of what’s possible when folks come together in a spirit of abundance and empathy. The possibilities are endless. We believe the world is ready for an upgrade to the traditional market economy. There’s room for improvement, and we want to be part of the change we hope to see in the world. That’s what we’re about.”
About ShareThing, Inc. ShareThing, Inc. is an early-stage app development company and the maker of the BuyNothing app—a mobile-first and web-optimized, peer-to-peer resource-sharing application, designed to facilitate and empower people in their reuse, recycling, gifting and sharing of material goods and services within their “hyperlocal” gift economy communities. The BuyNothing app is designed to be a proprietary platform to house the global Buy Nothing Project movement. The company aims to grow the app and the community to reach billions worldwide and take on the reusable waste generated by the $27 trillion global retail market, an untapped and abundant resource that builds our communities and reconnects neighbors across socioeconomic and other divides.