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City Share Club

City Share Club is a membership club for sharing of small household items including tools, yard care, and small kitchen appliances.  

Leader

Ann Marie Henke

Location

Massachusetts Ave Cambridge , MA 02138

About the project

City Share Club is a sharing membership club that shares small household items such as tools, yard items and small household appliances.  

In Rachel Botsman's TED presentation she famously states that a drill is used on average for 7 minutes over its entire life. People do not need the drill, they need the hole. 
 
But if you look at most homes, why does every home have a drill? A weed eater, or a bread machine? What we need is a way ro access these items in an urban environment and that is where City Share Club comes in to play. It is a membership based club where the members called clubsters can borrow items which can be delivered to people's homes.  
 
What we would like to do is to create a sharing system that is managed by a third party versus P2P and provide people with an alternate to having to drive to a big box store.  We hope the ultimate outcome is a different way that people think about the home goods market the same way bike and car sharing has evolved their respective markets. 

The Steps

The key step for City Share Club is to provide a user friendly web interface that allows the member to:

  1. Be inspired by projects that people have done with shared goods
  2. Allow the "clubster" to search for items
  3. Create a reservation system leveraging existing tool sharing software and billing software

Once the website is set up we will begin marketing including the use of social media, working with local real estate agents to promote CSC to their clients, and working with other collaborative consumption organizations.  

Why we‘re doing it

I'm doing this because we have too much stuff.  We buy things that we only use for a single project that will sit on a shelf afterwards and gather dust.   That doesn't make sense and quite frankly is not cost effective.  Beyond the money that we spend, the majority of all small household items are imported which is bad for the economy and the carbon footprint.  I bet you never thought of an electric sander as having a carbon footprint but It was shipped thousand of miles in a container then trucked to the big box store. 

I want to encourage, inspire and enable people to refinish that old piece of furniture, fix that door, and plant a tree. And City Share Club can provide them access to the tools they neeed to make this happen.  It is a new way of doing business but it has the potential to change the way we think about small household items. 
 
For more information on why we need City Share Club please go here http://cityshareclub.com/sharethisidea/

$600.00 / $600.00