WASHINGTON - By 9pm on April 5, the authorities in Ottawa, capital of Canada, had reports of 600 trees down and a million people plunged into darkness as an intense ice storm lashed the area. Two people died, both hit by falling trees or branches.

It was in this freezing darkness that a local “Buy Nothing” group came through for its members.

“People who still had power offered freezer space for use to preserve food,” says 43-year-old writer Jodi Ettenberg, an Ottawa resident and member of her local Buy Nothing group, which is part of the Buy Nothing movement.

“People offered charging stations for mobile phones, or hot meals, or a place to shower. And they posted reports of downed trees,” Ms Ettenberg told The Straits Times.

On Buy Nothing groups, members post on social media anything they want to give away, lend or share among neighbours – each group is geographically local – or ask for anything they need. No cash is exchanged. 

The Buy Nothing movement replicates an old-fashioned neighbourhood network. It has more than six million members across 44 countries, including Singapore. The group Ms Ettenberg is in has about 2,100 members.

The movement was started as an experimental Facebook group – Buy Nothing Bainbridge – in 2013 by two friends. Ms Rebecca Rockefeller and Ms Liesl Clark, from Bainbridge Island, east of Seattle in the United States, both had a penchant for sustainability and frugal living.

The mission of the movement: “Give, receive, lend, share, and show gratitude in hyper-local gift economies, where the true wealth is the connections between real neighbours.”

“It’s a model of collaborative consumption,” Ms Clark told ST over the phone.

“We can have more economic and environmental and social impact if we are not acting as individual consumers, but are mindfully sharing and lending and borrowing within our circular economies in each community,” she said.

Someone who wants to get rid of an old yet still functional appliance, for instance, can make a post on their local Buy Nothing group and another household that needs the item can pick it up for free.

Almost any item, from gadgets to novelties, can be posted on a Buy Nothing group. Baby clothes and toys, swiftly outgrown by their users, are often high on the list of items that circulate.  

Ms Clark was inspired by her time spent in remote villages in Nepal – her husband is renowned mountaineer Peter Athans – where she noticed that people reused their belongings, and shared rather than bought what they needed.

The groups across the world are run by autonomous volunteer administrators.

Additionally, in 2021, the founders launched an app, enabling groups to function independently of Facebook.

The growth of the movement has brought mixed results. Splinter groups have been formed. Groups are only as active as their members – especially their administrators. A request for membership in the Washington group by this reporter, sent days before, had yet to draw a response by the time this article was filed.

A recent report in a major American publication, Wired, proclaimed that the movement had “imploded” following members’ disagreements with the founders, or with one another.

But some members say that is an exaggeration.

“Not only are we setting up more and more Buy Nothing groups on Facebook, we’re also getting, on average, 1,500 new downloads a day of the Buy Nothing app,” Ms Clark said. “We have upwards of 132,000 monthly active users of the app.”

Ms Ettenberg said: “This is just what happens when something scales up so large, I think. But also, it depends on where the community is at – in my area of Ottawa, there doesn’t seem to be any infighting issues or pettiness or squabbles.”

She added: “The bigger the movement gets, the more you’re going to have people who join for the wrong reasons or may not be as open to the ethos.”

That ethos is Buy Nothing’s cardinal rule: It is a gifting economy, so you cannot sell things.

San Francisco resident Linda True is similarly happy with her local Buy Nothing group, which is so active that the administrator had to cap the number of members.

“I tend to give away a lot of novelty items – it’s a way of passing on the joy,” said Ms True, 45.

It was also a nice way to have positive interactions with people during the isolation phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, she added.

Similarly, Ms Ettenberg found her local Buy Nothing group to be a “lifeline” during the pandemic.

“I would give things and I would talk to them for a few minutes, and some of them became friends,” she said.

Ms Clark said one of the most powerful aspects of a hyper-local gift economy in a community is resilience.

“You can take care of your own people within your community,” she said. “You’ll find that people, because they already know one another, and they’ve met in person as well as virtually, really do feel that they have come to know proximate neighbours, so they can help one another.”

That the Buy Nothing movement has spawned spin-off groups does not bother her.

“We don’t own the idea of hyper-local gift economies,” she said. “And the more different models of that, the better.”

“Hopefully, we will ultimately render ourselves obsolete and people will be doing this in their everyday lives… The more we can inculcate that behaviour in our communities, the better off we will all be.”