The Sustainable Economies Law Center (SELC) facilitates the growth of sustainable, localized, and just economies, through legal research, professional training, resource development, and education about practices such as:

· Cooperatives
· Community-supported enterprises
· Barter
· Sharing
· Local currencies
· Intentional communities, ecovillages, cohousing
· Affordable housing and limited equity housing
· Urban agriculture
· Community-based renewable energy
· Community land trusts
· Social enterprise
· Microlending
· Local investing
· Co-op banks/credit unions

In addition to creating and making available resources to the public, SELC provides training to legal professionals, student interns, and others, empowering them with tools to bring about more sustainable, localized, and just economies.  SELC also convenes special working groups, bringing together experts and practitioners from various fields, for the purpose of investigating, collecting resources for, and developing resources in specialized areas.

Based in Oakland, California, SELC is a fiscally sponsored project of Community Ventures, a California 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. All SELC projects are currently managed by volunteer attorneys.

Something I thought was cool is that the concept has met with no resistance from the taxi company with exclusive rights to service Sea-Tac, whose representatives said “If people want to be creative and save money and be more green, we’re absolutely OK with that.”

The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission is on board with taxi-sharing, too. In July of last year the “Commissioner’s Corner” column addressed the different ways the Taxi and Limousine Commission was supporting taxi-sharing, including pilot programs to develop multi-fare meters, support group riding at reduced rates from taxi stands at points on busy corridors, and place “livery stands” at places like shopping centers.

In U.S. cities, where taxis usually supplement public transportation systems, cab-sharing is a great way for consumers to save money while, in many cases, generating additional revenue for the cab driver. In other parts of the world, taxis actually are public transportation. When I was in Amman, Jordan last year, we went everywhere by cab–there is no public transportation, and taxis are super cheap and always available. And according to Wikipedia, dozens of other countries use taxis as the main form of transportation, calling the service everything from “multi-hire taxi” to “taxibus.”

It’s probably best to face the two challenges in the order listed, so that you and the other sharers can hire the nanny together and be sure everyone is fully on board with that crucial choice. There are a lot of issues to negotiate in setting up the sharing arrangement, too–hours, transportation, what the children are to be fed, what types of activities you want them to be engaged in, and how you’ll share costs and deal with taxes. All of these questions are resolvable, especially if you talk about them in advance–as with most sharing agreements, communication is key here.

Sharing child care has a ton of advantages. It saves money for everyone, conserves resources, and provides children with opportunities to socialize with others in a home environment. Challenging as it may be to find the right setup, once you do it’s likely to benefit your family in the short and long term.
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And I’m glad she chose to focus right in on this, because skeptical readers might otherwise roll their eyes an article that extols the virtues of sharing, without addressing the barriers. This is especially important, because she didn’t just write about simple sharing arrangements, such as lawnmower sharing. She actually gave examples of what we might call EXTREME SHARING, including a moving example of organ sharing (donating a kidney to a stranger). She even touches on the sharing of lovers among members of a commune (noting, however, that the commune members found that possessiveness and jealousies eventually got in the way of sharing everything). Very interesting stuff!

Today’s Times article focused primarily on younger adults coming together to share rental housing. It might appear from the article that shared housing appeals mainly to twenty-somethings.  But during many of my recent public speaking events, I met a LOT of graying-haired people interested in shared housing, and many of them are just as idealistic as the youth described in the Times. They are looking to live more sustainably, build a supportive community around them, and find new kinds of personal rewards in their housing arrangement.  The difference might be that the 40- to 60-somethings are more often in the market to buy, rather than rent, and they are thinking about a longer term living arrangement.

I was a little baffled by the part of the article that cited Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist, who thought the “idealized, small-scale communities they described reminded her of the hunting and gathering bands of pre-history.” She profiled the home-sharers as compassionate, emotive, verbal, and/or creative types. As a result, “she worried that other personality types, the sort who know how to fix the toaster or program the VCR, weren’t being invited into these houses.”

Somehow, I don’t think this is going to be a problem.  These particular young folks are part of Generation DIY – they are the ultimate practitioners of do-it-yourself, fix your own bike, grow your own food, make things from recycled junk, build solar ovens, and rig the plumbing to recycle grey water. They do things like lead soldering workshops at the Brooklyn Skillshare.

And the fact that they are verbal and compassionate means they have the skills to express themselves, understand each other’s needs, and navigate interpersonal conflict – all of which is far more crucial to their survival than the ability to fix a toaster.  They are resourceful and they will thrive.

Besides, if they really can’t fix the toaster, I’m sure they’ll find some other good use for it:

Shared housing is great from an economic standpoint, but here are some of the other reasons it’s cool (from Chapter 6 of The Sharing Solution):

• Shared housing can be a gateway to ownership.
• Shared housing can get you more for your money–like a larger yard or a hot tub.
• Shared housing helps seniors and people with disabilities, who can share the cost of in-home care and other services.
• Shared housing creates community and facilitates convenience–having other people around decreases isolation and offers support.
• Shared housing saves the planet–did you know that 75% of the lumber produced in the U.S. goes into homebuilding? And the construction of new housing, as well as the maintenance of houses once built, tax the planet in innumerable ways. Sharing uses less energy and less stuff, and makes it easier to afford sustainable materials and systems (like solar or grey water).

There are some tricks to sharing successfully, though. Some of the most useful information in the Chronicle article is in a sidebar called “Resources,” which offers tips from experienced sharers about how to have a happy housing share. We agree with everything said there, including taking your time choosing your roommates and checking references–and especially the tips about keeping things harmonious in your home, like the advice to write up an agreement, to discuss how you’ll resolve disputes, and to address problems while they’re still small.

To these excellent bits of advice we’d add the suggestion that you take some time to learn to be an effective communicator, so that when you address those small problems they stay addressed, rather than creating additional problems because you raised the issue in a way that wasn’t comfortable for your roomie. We recommend highly Sharon Ellison‘s book, The Art of Non-Defensive Communication, available at the Powerful Non-Defensive Communication website.

That’s better.

We are on the brink of something exciting, something with the power to transform our world. I love to imagine the near future, when people everywhere share cars with their neighbors, start local tool-lending libraries and childcare cooperatives, do regular mealsharing with friends, and form casual cohousing arrangements in every neighborhood. What’s more, the value of all of these things is somehow greater than the sum of their parts, and the potential of it all makes me gasp.

First of all, I’ve seen all those tiny green sprouts popping up all over the place. They are everywhere: sprouts of hope, new technologies, new attitudes, social justice,green collar jobs, and community building. They are sprouts of community gardens,solar panels, bicycle lanes, buy-local initiatives, recycling programs, fair trade,microlending programs, restored creeks, and so many other beautiful things.

Okay, granted, there’s a huge grey cloud making it hard to see these little sprouts. It’s true that the economy, the environment, war, unemployment, evictions, foreclosures, homelessness, contamination, water shortages, businesses closing, and the disappearance of fish in the sea, to name a few, make for one very large grey cloud(VERY LARGE GREY CLOUD).

But the sprouts are most definitely there. What I’m wondering is: When are these sprouts going to grow enough to overtake the grey cloud? Seems to me that if they grow just enough, they’ll create fertile ground for more growth, and more, and more! But for now, their growth is frustratingly slow. Too slow?

I could think of ways to speed them up, but many ways require change mostly beyond my control. There are top-down changes, like getting the government to put money into green-collar job creation, instead of, say, prisons. But I’m not holding my breath — and I’m not expecting our government to catalyze the growth of the sustainability movement (though I truly appreciate that our President is on the right track).

What about all those millions of people with wonderful ideas, great intentions, and the will to change the world? The grassroots! Couldn’t they (I mean, we) get this new green revolution going? Unfortunately, with the way things are going, I’m worried that we won’t. So many of us are overworked, burnt out, struggling to make ends meet, and worried a lot about our own survival right now. It’s not easy contending with a large grey cloud.

But I only say all this to emphasize the importance of the missing ingredient: Sharing! Or, perhaps I should say: SHARING! Sharing has the most potential to add momentum to the changes already taking place, getting us to the tipping point where a sustainable and socially just world is truly possible. Sharing is not just the fertilizer that helps those green sprouts grow bigger. Sharing is more like a catalyst — one small ingredient that you can add to the mix that makes everything just explode.

The power of sharing is unique in a handful of ways:

• Sharing, unlike recycling, is naturally contagious. Sharing opens up a pattern of generosity and mutual caring that breeds on itself. A lot of other things we do to change the world aren’t quite so viral. One person reducing his or her waste, for example, may or may not inspire a neighbor to do so. But offering to let your neighbor use your basketball hoop or eat strawberries from your patch opens up the flood gates of generosity.
• Sharing is self-serving, so we’ll want to do it. Sharing helps us meet our needs more efficiently and cheaply, and sharing our snow blower with a neighbor might mean that she will let us use her hot tub. (Yessss!) Sharing builds community, which makes us happier people, and cooperation has been shown to release endorphins. So there’s no need to force anyone to share — people will naturally start doing it to enjoy the benefits.
• Sharing reverses the drain on our time, energy, and resources. For those of us who are spread way too thin, sharing saves resources, money, time, and energy, thereby freeing us up to garden, compost, recycle, hang our laundry, ride our bicycle, volunteer, advocate for social and environmental justice, and do things to help ourselves and the planet. We’ll all get a little more rest, the support of a community of sharers, and the strength we need to get all the sprouts growing. In short, sharing gives the grassroots the time, energy, and resources we need to grow a better world.
• Sharing connects all of our isolated world-changing acts and boosts their potential. As I noted, the sprouts are everywhere — people planting urban food gardens, composting their food waste, and installing solar panels. But many of these are things we do in isolation — and when we can find the time and energy. Sharing adds the element of community, which boosts the potential and the impact of everything we do — neighbors can get together to jointly purchase or bargain for solar power, or they can start a neighborhood compost project. It’s more efficient, and each additional person who joins the effort compounds the benefit to the earth and to the others in the group. Much of what we do to save the world can be done better if we organize and cooperate, and it can be much more fun that way, too!
• We don’t have to wait for someone else to hurry up and do anything. We don’t have to wait until our government starts a new program or provides needed funding. We don’t need to change the laws. We don’t have to wait until a scientist invents a solution. We don’t even need to form a nonprofit orfundraise to get started. We just start sharing. Today.
• Every single one of us can share. I’ve been known to say things like: “I can’t afford to make a donation;” “I don’t have time to volunteer more;” and “I don’t know how to install solar panels.” It’s all true. But it’s hard to say, “I can’t afford to share,” or “I don’t have time to share,” or “I don’t know how to share.” Sharing is something that everyone can do. Even a curmudgeon, even a poor person, even a busy person. I think the hardest part is getting started, then ironing out the details, understanding everyone’s expectations, and figuring out the logistics. But my friend Emily Doskow and I just wrote a book to help everyone through that part. So otherwise, there’s nothing stopping any of us from sharing.
• Sharing is a clean and easy way to get rid of the big grey cloud. Somehow or another, we need to get rid of that cloud. Otherwise our future looks like, well, a big grey cloud. There are all kinds of approaches to this — some folksreform the system, lobbying, advocating, and making changes bit-by-bit. This is an important thing to do, but it’s way too slow. Others propose bringing down the system in one fell swoop, which usually involves an uprising, or a full-blown violent revolution. I can only imagine that this would be messy. Very messy. The system has very large weapons, and even if we do succeed in taking out the system, we will then be faced with the task of rebuilding something on top of a big mess. Fortunately, we really don’t need to remove the system before we can start replacing it. Even while the grey cloud is still hanging out, we can start sharing, nourishing our local economies, going organic, and creating rewarding green-collar job opportunities. The spouts of our new system will simply overtake the cloud with time.

First, there’s the “grow or die” economy — where companies must compete in order to survive, grow in order to compete, and create increasing demand for their products in order to grow. And the best way for a company to sell a lot of a product is to create a culture of “self-reliance” and “convenience,” convincing all people that they should have one of their OWN. This culture of “self-reliance” is so ingrained in us that it would feel awkward asking the guy in the neighboring apartment unit if he would like to share a vacuum cleaner. Vacuum manufacturers would want us to believe that we should each have a vacuum, or even two.

Second, there’s the fact that, until recently, we could maintain this lifestyle without actually seeing the impact of it. Now we have seen how perpetual growth is eating away at the planet’s natural resources, melting the icecaps, and undermining a stable economy. Now the images of factory farms and third world sweatshops have made their way into our minds, and we are all searching for a more compassionate and sustainable way.

In the meantime, we have gotten out of practice with sharing. Sharing and cooperation are arguably as old as civilization itself. But today, much of the sharing and cooperation we do are managed by the government or businesses via incredibly complex systems of global cooperation. As consumers, we mostly just experience the end-products, such as electricity, water, manufactured goods, and food. So while we benefit greatly from cooperation, we have lost the ability to do it directly and face-to-face. In this sense, we are a vulnerable culture. We are blinded to the harms that our consumption inflicts on the world, and we are not prepared to meet our needs if or when the complex system crumbles.

So we might as well roll up our sleeves now, gather our friends, family, and neighbors, and get creative. Solar power cooperatives, neighborhood rainwater catchment installations, a cooperatively owned water purification system, community supported agriculture, neighborhood fruit tree harvests… The possibilities are endless and they will completely transform our world. That’s why it’s a sharing revolution. Not a trend, not a movement, but a REVOLUTION. Goodbye grey cloud. Sharing is here to save the planet.

Other states are sharing, too. In New Jersey, one county closed its juvenile detention facility, saving millions, and sent the detainees to a neighboring county. In Missouri and Pennsylvania, cities and boroughs voted to consolidate into other counties or towns to save money on services that otherwise would be duplicated. As the economy continues to struggle, we feel sure more and more people, organizations, and entities will catch on to the sharing solution