Freegle News 4: Unprecedented times

An SOS from Freegle

Freegle helps people give and get things for free in their local community. Some people have stuff they don't want any more. Other people would like things they don't have. We match them up. As well as preventing waste and encouraging reuse Freegle provides invaluable access to free items for disadvantaged members of the community, ensuring that they don't have to make financial compromises in order to furnish their homes and get hold of equipment and other things that they may need.

We don't have physical premises, or warehouses - people give things directly to each other. It's like online dating for stuff and we have been successfully doing this for over ten years.

Freegle is free to join, free to use and everything on it is free. We have over 3 million members across the UK, more than 500 local Freegle communities with around 1000 volunteers who support these communities. In the last 12 months we have stopped 4000 tonnes of items from being wasted, saving over 2000 tonnes of CO2 and generating around £3m worth of social and economic benefit.

Due to COVID-19 all of this is threatened. We are mostly funded from donations given by freeglers and no freegling means our income has collapsed overnight – but we still have significant expenditure to keep running . To ensure that Freegle is still here when things get back to normal, we are looking for emergency funding to bridge this short-term gap.

You can really help by sponsoring your local Freegle communities. This funding could be sourced from your advertising and publicity budget for example.

Each Freegle community, depending on size, costs between £250 and £750 per year to run, which offers excellent value for money.

In exchange for your sponsorship we will provide the
following package to ensure that you residents are aware that you are providing much-needed support:

For every Freegle community you sponsor, your authority logo will be shown as supporting that community on our website.
Our email alerts telling members of a community about new items being given or requested will have your logo, so our members will know that you are helping to keep their group running.
We will use our extremely active social media channels to spread the word that your organisation is doing your bit to promote a more environmentally sustainable way of living and help alleviate local poverty.
We will provide detailed feedback on how well the group or groups that you sponsor are doing by generating a range of membership and reuse data.

Furthermore we have hundreds of positive stories from our members to share with you; here are just a couple of those:

"Freegle has helped a lot due to me and my children fleeing to Birmingham because of domestic abuse and now we finally been given our own house and I’m grateful for all the help I’m receiving from people on here."

"We had a very good but out of date Sony Trinitron TV to give away. Until May 2017 it had been used by my father-in-law who was slowly disappearing into dementia. We'd bought him a modern flat screen TV with Freeview but he'd struggled to adapt to this, so the old TV came out of the cupboard and with the help of Freeview box meant he could watch his favourite channels on a big TV he was happy using. He died in May 2017. Slowly, over time we emptied his home and my brother-in-law was about to take the TV to the tip. I suggested I put it on Freegle. It looked at first like there were no takers, then after 10 days Karen contacted me. Her mum had Alzheimer’s and needed an old fashioned TV she may be happier using. We met, had a lovely chat, shared difficult stories of dealing with immediate relatives with memory conditions and handed over the TV . A day later I received a text message: 'Thank u so much for kindly gifting your father-in-laws t.v., it's working perfectly & mum's sitting feet up happily watching, blissfully unaware! ' Cheers Freegle!!"

For more information about sponsoring your local Freegle community and for any other information please contact councils@ilovefreegle.org