by Tiffany Nicholson

Created on: August 14, 2007   Last Updated: August 15, 2007

There mission: "to build a worldwide gifting movement that reduces waste, saves precious resources & eases the burden on our landfills while enabling our members to benefit from the strength of a larger community."

Freecycle Network is a grassroots and entirely nonprofit movement for people to and get stuff for free in their towns. It started with one person, Deron Beal, on May 1st 2003, he started this organization with 40 emails to friends and some local nonprofits. At this time he was working for small nonprofit that did recycling for people in the Tucson AZ area. Mr. Beal and other crewmembers time after time seen many perfectly good items being thrown away, so they found themselves taking the items and driving around to various charities and nonprofits to see if they could use them. However, they knew that they couldn't keep doing all that running around, that is when he made freecycle.org.

His concept of giving and getting for free has spread to more than fifty countries, with thousands of local groups and more than a million members. Each of the local groups are moderated by a local volunteer, to see if your town has a group go to the site and do a search or browse through the groups. If there is not a group in your town, you can start one. I was thinking of starting one in my town, since there isn't one.
For questions about starting a group, you can email them at volunteers@freecycle.org . You can also volunteer for more than just group moderation such as, Mentor Mods Team Member (MMods), Graphics Team Member, New Group Appprover Team Member (NGA), Group Outreach and Assistance Team Member (GOA), Trademark Team Member (TM Team), Interim Mod Team Member (IMod Team). The website has more details about these volunteer positions.

To use Freecycle, after you've signed up and join a local group. Depending on what you want to do, either give of get, you will need to send an email to your groups yahoo address or find the "massages" button on the group site and click it.

This network of giving with no strings attached is a great way to restore a sense of generosity that has diminished in our communities. Thanks to Freecycle's efforts, they estimate that fifty tons of (perfectly good) trash a day will not go landfills. This is also good for our communities.

Freecycle is incorporated as a nonprofit in Arizona, Their application for federal nonprofit status, 501(c) 3 ruling, is still pending, this means for the time being all donations made to The Freecycle Network are not tax deductible. Of course, if you keep them necessary paper work your donations made (roughly) after July 2004 could be retroactively become tax deductible once the IRS approves their nonprofit status. If you are planning to do this check with Freecycle and the IRS to make sure you can.

There are rules, and I do suggest following them if you want to stay in a group. You are kicked out after two strikes. The rules are:
One: Item must be Free, Legal and Appropriate for all ages, Two: No Posting the Same "wanted" Posting More Than Once a Month, Three: No Politics, No Spam, No money, No Personal Attacks/rudeness, No Proselytizing/Religion, Four: No trading, There are a few more but these are the basics.

Physical address:
The Freecycle Network, P.O. Box 294, Tucson, AZ 85702

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