Shareable
By Mira Luna
August 31st, 2014

As a founding member of the Sharing Cities Network (SCN), Shareable interviewed Arroyo Sustainable Economies Organization (ASECO) to get the scoop on their recently released plan to create Share LA. It's a bold plan to turn notoriously unequal and sprawling Los Angeles into a community-oriented, resource sharing city for all. To read the full plan for Share LA and vote for them, visit the LA 2050 GOOD Challenge.

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Join us at 1642, an intimate beer and wine bar owned by ASNTB member Liz Fichsbach, on Saturday, September 6th for a critical mass voting party!

Arroyo S.E.C.O. has entered to win $100,000 from the Goldhirsch Foundation to show why Los Angeles will be the best place to connect by 2050. Emphasizing what we know works (TIMEBANKING!) and visioning new ways to bring more sharing economy solutions to LA communities, we hope to produce a fully open-source blueprint that can show any city how to become a Sharing City. In partnership with Shareable's Sharing City Network, we hope to make LA the nation's sharing leader.

So come have an ice cold one or a glass of your favorite vintage with us! High-five your fellow time bankers! And definitely vote for our ShareLA campaign! The organization with the most online votes wins a hundred grand! Let's make sure it's us!

Saturday, September 6th
6-9PM
1642 Bar
1642 W. Temple St
L.A. CA 90026

Everyone is welcome, so bring a friend or three!

Voting runs September 2nd-16th. But you don't have to wait for our party. Go ahead and vote for us NOW!
www.myLA2050connect.maker.good.is/projects/ShareLA

By Lares Feliciano for Shareable
(re-posted here with consent)

Shareable has been telling stories from the frontlines of the sharing movement since 2009. Stories of tool lending libraries, timebanks, community clothing swaps, and visions of a worldwide sharing economy. Over time, the visions have turned into realities, the seedlings into sprouting truths. It’s undeniable: the sharing movement is growing every day.

Answering the call from communities to turn words into action, we have stepped up our game since early 2013 and have fostered the growth of sharing cities by coordinating: The Sharing Cities Network, Map Jams, ShareFests, Seed Grants, Sharing Cities Fellowship and Sharing Cities Community Pages.

A big thanks from the bottom of our hearts to all the organizers and donors that contributed time and money - without you there would be no network and no sharing cities. To share a window into this work, we put together a video that tells the powerful story of our collective efforts and what we can achieve when we work together. Watch it, share it, and feel proud of the role all of you have played in making all this happen. Then scroll down to learn more about the Sharing Cities Network and how to get involved.

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By Cat Johnson for Shareable
Published March 11th, 2014
(Re-posted here with consent)

When Sarah McGowan Dear made a career shift from doing social work to working for herself, she learned some valuable lessons.  Among them were that she would never qualify for a small business loan, and that developing relationships within her community was the best way to build her business. So, she kept building community.

“I continued to connect people” she explains, “[to] build sharing networks among civic groups, and work to bring people together to leverage social capital rather than give in to the antiquated paradigm of market competition and distrustful secrecy.”

One of the ways she connected people was through the Arroyo Seco Network of Time Banks (ASNTB) in Los Angeles. Through this work she saw how many small businesses were emerging as a result of skillshares and exchanges within the network. As project developer, McGowan Dear researched ways of “matching untapped resources with unmet community needs.” Part of this research involved a trip to the New Economy Institute in Massachusetts. It was on this trip, she says, that “the collective light bulb went off” for herself and ASNTB co-founders Janine Christiano and Autumn Rooney, and the idea for a loan fund for the time bank was born.