Golden Age of Gaia

Toward a World that Works for Everyone

Menu
  • Home
    • About The Staff
    • FAQs
    • Glossary
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms of Service
    • Downloads Page
    • Close
  • Contact Us
  • Commentary
    • Charlie
    • Kat
    • Kathleen Mary Willis
    • Narendra Mishra
    • Sitara
    • Steve Beckow
    • Suzanne Maresca
    • Writer’s Corner
    • Close
  • News
    • Ascension
    • Accountability
    • Building Nova Earth 1
    • Channelings/Commentary
    • Reval/GCR/Stewardship/Abundance
    • Homelessness
    • InLight Universal Shows
    • New Maps of Heaven
    • Opioid Crisis
    • Politics
    • Spirituality
    • Close
  • Library
  • Hope Chest
    • Hope Chest: Frequently Asked Questions
    • Close
  • Forums
  • Donate
/ Home / News / Building Nova Earth 1 / A World That Works for Everyone / Building Community by Buying Nothing & An Invitation to Food Abundance
post

Building Community by Buying Nothing & An Invitation to Food Abundance

October 24, 2021 by Kathleen Mary Willis

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

“It’s like a radical new economy, except of course it’s an old economy that has been around forever.”

By Lornet Turnbull, Yes, August 10, 2021

https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/how-much-is-enough/2021/08/10/building-community-gift-economy

Following knee surgery five years ago, Myra Anderson was having difficulty getting around.

Living alone in Charlottesville, Virginia, she began asking on Facebook if anyone could assist her in getting a few supplies.

A friend suggested the Buy Nothing Project, a network for the free sharing of resources among neighbors.

Anderson signed up, but unaware of the rules, offered to leave money on her front stoop to pay for supplies if someone could bring them to her.

By the time a message popped up in her inbox from the group administrator alerting her that’s not how Buy Nothing works, dozens of people had already offered to pick up what she needed—at no cost, of course.

Soon, people Anderson didn’t know began regularly checking in on her. She found a walking and workout partner in the group.

When she’d post about feeling blue, people would respond with comfort, support, and encouragement.

“The love that has come from people I didn’t know, but just knowing they live near me, has been overwhelming and refreshing for my soul,” Anderson says.

These were the sort of genuine connections that Rebecca Rockefeller and Liesl Clark envisioned back in 2013 when they created Buy Nothing—a gift economy operated on a hyperlocal scale to bring neighbors together through sharing and community.

Neither a group, organization, association, or nonprofit, Buy Nothing is a movement that has doubled in size during the pandemic.

It now has more than 4 million participants in 6,500 groups, located in 44 countries across the globe.

“It’s like a radical new economy, except of course it’s an old economy that has been around forever,” Rockefeller says. “We’re just re-presenting it.”

In the Beginning

Clark and Rockefeller, who both live on Bainbridge Island, Washington, came to the project through very different life paths.

Clark has traveled to the Himalayas each summer for the past 14 years doing archaeological research.

In the villages where she, her family, and their team stayed for months at a time, she noticed a close bond among residents unlike what she was accustomed to in the United States.

Every resource that came into the villages was “used up and shared and reused and repaired and reused again and then repurposed into something else until it had met its demise,” Clark says.

All the wealth was shared equally.

“Here we were studying this very old culture, up to 3,000 years old, while at the same time seeing that the modern folks were using their materials in a way that was so beautiful and eye-opening,” she adds. “The only way these cultures could survive was literally by always ensuring that the weakest were carried along with them.”

Around the same time, Rockefeller suddenly found herself a single parent raising two children who needed special education.

She was struggling financially, so she applied for and received food assistance.

But the process of requalifying, she says, felt dehumanizing.

Much of the social-support network in the U.S., designed to care for people in need, is shame-based, she says. “The worst was that I had a distinct impression that I had become a burden on my community and on my society, and I wanted my role as a giver back. I wanted to be able to balance the taking with generosity.”

Both Rockefeller and Clark could see clearly what many can’t see because of a capitalist economy that promulgates the concept of scarcity—the idea that there aren’t enough resources to go around.

“That is not the reality of the world,” Rockefeller says. “We believe our innate human nature is one of compassion and generosity that understands that we survive only together.

That’s the only way we’re ever going to be able to make it and live sustainably on this planet.”

The two were convinced that what Clark witnessed in the Himalayas could be replicated here in the U.S.—and set out to prove it.

Challenges Bring Change

But the pair never envisioned the project would become as big as it has, nor were they prepared for some of the challenges that would accompany the rapid expansion of such a diverse, global movement.

Because many U.S. neighborhoods are still racially segregated, Buy Nothing communities, which in the beginning were geographic clusters of 1,000 people, were essentially reaffirming racist, redlining boundaries.

Members also started pushing back against the 1,000-member cap, originally established to ensure the groups would remain responsive and tight knit; they didn’t want the communities they had formed to be split off into subgroups, known as sprouting.

Since membership is determined by home address, there were concerns about people, like the unhoused, being denied membership.

Some people in communities of color said they felt that group administrators were unresponsive to their concerns and complaints; they felt shut out or shut down.

Some clusters parted ways with Buy Nothing to form their own giving communities.

Clark and Rockefeller have worked to address these problems, loosening some of the rules, adding foundational documents to the group’s website as well as guidelines on how to create a gift economy.

Buy Nothing also created an equity team in 2019 to develop strategies for addressing the issues the group was grappling with.

Katherine Valenzuela Parsons, a member of the equity team and a volunteer administrator for a Buy Nothing group that she started in Moseley, Virginia, says the team has spent the past two years “trying to put ownership into the hands of the local community and letting them know that they make the decisions at the end of the day. … We’re trying to put as many resources out there as possible.”

Additionally, Buy Nothing, which exists mostly on Facebook, is creating a new app that will allow anyone to connect and share with people near where they are, without needing to request access to a group or fit within specific geographic boundaries.

They expect to launch the app by September 2021.

Connecting People

Meanwhile, people around the globe continue to find community in its many forms through their Buy Nothing connections.

After hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria devastated parts of the U.S. and the Caribbean, for example, communities near and far gathered goods and supplies to help those in need.

Buy Nothing communities delivered tents, tarps, sleeping bags, and solar panels to “forgotten communities” in Nepal following the magnitude 7.8 earthquake that devastated the country in 2015.

“That kind of giving builds community among the people who are assembling all of the items,” Rockefeller says, “and it also builds connections between the two communities that are giving and receiving from each other.”

Buy Nothing has also proven to be a powerful way to connect neighbors who might never have crossed paths otherwise.

When Kate Watkins in Brisbane, Australia, asked her group if someone could feed her cat while she was away, the person who stepped up lived just around the corner from her home.

“From those small seeds blossomed a fully grown friendship where she now comes along to my birthday parties, and my puppy (a new addition to the family) is more excited to see her than me!” she wrote in an email.

In Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Amy Trojanowski has exchanged plenty of goods with a next-door neighbor she met on Buy Nothing—taking the proverbial “cup of sugar” to a whole new level.

She and another neighbor down the street regularly sit outside Trojanowski’s house, socially distanced, and “talk forever,” she says, adding, “It was amazing to be able to make a new friend during COVID.”

In LaTonya Baldwin’s case, the Buy Nothing Project created a cohort of friends in the Detroit area that she’s come to lean on over the past five years.

They supported her decision to leave her corporate job to become a doula and stood beside her following her father’s sudden death.

In 2019, when she moved from Farmington Hills, Michigan, where she had established that area’s first Buy Nothing community, to Detroit, where she has created another, the people she met along the way eagerly stepped up to help.

One member went house hunting with her, based on the flurry of recommendations others were sending.

They showed up to help with the packing and on moving day, too.

In the end, she says, the exchange of resources is just an opportunity to connect.

“What drew me to the Project was its mission,” Baldwin says. “What I didn’t know was how deep and lasting those relationships could be.”


 

An Invitation to Food Abundance

Photo by Mike De Socio/YES! magazine

Jammella Anderson, above, launched Free Food Fridge Albany last summer at the height of the pandemic and resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement.

As a Black woman, she wanted to push herself, and White allies, to be less performative and more action-oriented when it came to addressing systemic inequities—starting with food access.

Through her social media organizing, a network of six fridges is now set up across Albany, New York, stocked and supported by a local grocery store, nearby farms and restaurants, and individual volunteers—as well as more than 500 people who donate funds monthly via Patreon.

Fridge beneficiaries can retrieve anything from milk to veggies and prepared meals.

Albany’s “freedges” are part of a global network of free community fridges that expanded during the pandemic.

Read the full story by Mike De Socio at yesmagazine.org/freedges


Lornet Turnbull is the former civil liberties editor for YES!, a Seattle-based freelance writer, and a regional freelance writer for The Washington Post. An award-winning enterprise reporter who’s worked in media for more than 20 years, Lornet has covered everything from the auto industry and labor unions in Michigan, to real estate and statehouse politics in Ohio, to homelessness in Seattle, to refugee children in the West Bank, and sex workers in Mexico City. She speaks English.


 

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Email

Filed Under: A World That Works for Everyone, An Idea Whose Time has Come, Building Nova Earth 1, Buy Nothing Project, Friendship

Subscribe to the Golden Age of Gaia

Recent Posts

  • The Federation of Light via Blossom Goodchild, June 21, 2025
  • Matthew’s Message through Suzy Ward, Nov. 1, 2023 (Reposted … Again)
  • Gazetteller: WEF ~ Global Elite Empire Collapses
  • Deep-State Hubs and Proxy Wars
  • 589bull on X ~ The Incoming “Quantum-Secure” System (Two-Fer)
  • From Darkness Unto Light, 21 June 2025 Update
  • The Art of Anchoring Higher Energies ~ Archangel Michael through Laura Smith Biswas
  • The Oracle: This is the Biggest Impact on Humanity
  • St. Germain: Is There Really Another War Going on Right Now?
  • Mother Mary: Awakening Divine Will

Archives

It’s “Official”!

What is the Purpose of Life?


Click on graphic

Time to Prepare for the Emergency Broadcasts?

An RV Checklist

Before and After the Reval

You’re invited to take some time out to read our wide-ranging selection

Breaking

Joe Biden: The President Who Never Was

You Have Prepared

https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Mary-Had-a-Little-Lamb-2.mp4

See From Darkness Unto Light – GCR, EBS, G/NESARA

Divine Mandates

Archangel Michael on Why All This Conflict is Occurring

Jesus: You are Bringing to Light What Needs to be Revealed

  • You live in tumultuous times and you live in a time of fulfilment. … You are leaving compassion and latitude for correction and understanding.
  • You are bringing to light what needs to be revealed so it doesn’t destroy the fiber of your society. …
 When you see the shadow, it defines the light.  (Jesus through Linda Dillon, Heart Call, Sept. 19, 2020.)

St. Germain: Action Against the Dark is in Accord with the Plan

Reign of Darkness is Over Once and for All

The Cabal’s Tin Toys and Party Favors

Aurora TR3-B

Adamu of the Pleiadian Monad: Please, take a second. Try to think.

If we are able to surround your planet with millions of ships of living light….

The Trump Effect

President Trump’s Second Declaration of Independence

The Greatest Show on Earth

Channeling President Trump

Trump Surprises Everyone

https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Trump-Approaches-Homeless-Veteran-Woman.mp4

Stands and Declarations

Digger: Address to Councils

The Question of Sending Love and Light

Can sending love and light be harmful?

We are the People of the Internet

https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/We-are-the-people-of-the-Internet.mp4
  • (This video can no longer be found on the Internet!)
  • The next, Love Revolution will happen, I predict, on the Internet

We are the World (1985)

Journalists vs Conspiracy Theorists

Can’t Say It More Clearly Than This

Hammer Blow to Woke Elites

https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Trump_-a-Hammer-Blow-to-Britains-Demented-Woke-Elites.mp4

A Global “No!” to the Deep State

1969 Doctors and Health Professionals: End all CV19 Measures

The Glorious Revival: Statement of Principles

The Rights of All Persons & The Duties of Government

The Westminster Declaration

The Hope Accord

MEGA MAGA: Making America Great Again while Making Planet Earth Great Again Too!

America shows the way to making Earth great again! All honor to America.

Issues and Warnings

Nothing Is as It Appears

A cogent analysis of the Alliance’s moves and countermoves against the deep state.

What’s Next?

The Reval, G/NESARA, and building Nova Earth….

A Word in Defense of Candace Owens

Candace argues from a more expanded view than most of us.

On Canada and the United States Uniting

An Inadequate View of Reality

No one group is the root of all evil in the world.

The Perfect Primer

The perfect primer for answering questions from the newly-awakened.

How Do I Make Sense of Our World?

  • The best introduction to the subject in recent memory.

Is U.S. Government a Colossal Globe-Spanning Racket?

Matthew Ward: Learning the Truth of What’s Happening

Matthew via Suzy Ward: Earth’s People are On the Move

Matthew Ward: Who are the Illuminati?

President Kennedy On the Peril We Face

Unpleasant Truths About the Deep State

9/11 – What Really Happened on That Day?

Pushing the Climate Change Hoax

The Next Scam: Climate Change

“Climate Change” is a Conspiracy Theory

Alex Newman: CO2 is Not Pollution

Dr. David E. Martin: The History of the Development of Covid 19

Covid 19 has been under development by the military as a bioweapon to be used against humans, since the early 1960s.

Dr. Peter McCullough: Let’s Win the War Against Therapeutic Nihilism

There is a Plan

There will be no world war. No nuclear devices can be exploded in space. Global martial law is to restore law and order worldwide. There is a Plan.

The Plan

Whitney Webb: What the World Faces

What G/NESARA Mandates

Ezra Cohen-Watnick: Spelling It Out 1 Time

Predicted Events

Five Point Plan

I suggest we follow a five point plan before rushing to reconciliation.

 

Tired of White-Hat Bias in Reporting

It Isn’t that We Don’t Censor….

  • Free speech is not unlimited.

Please support this site. Donate:


A 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit
  • Building, anchoring, and restoring hope, trust and Love within the human community.
  • "The key to Love is sharing, ... [balancing] give and receive." - The Divine Mother.

A Reader’s Encouragement

Downloads Page

(Always) free introductory texts on Ascension, Disclosure, Abundance, and Accountability. Especially of interest to those new to these subjects.

GAoG on Facebook

  • Did you know we have a Facebook page? Come see what we share.
  • URL: https://www.facebook.com/GoldenAgeofGaia22

 

HB & AHWAA Transcripts & Audios: Divine Beings, Universal Laws, Blessings & Virtues

* HB/AHWAA Transcripts and Audiotapes

* On the Importance of the Universal Laws

* The Universal Law: What, How, and Why?

Amanda Lamond: A Call to Legal Lightworkers

  • Legal Lightworkers, help bring in the next “legal system” and processes for the energetic dissolution of conflict using the Universal Laws.
  • For Light Warriors desiring deep ascension support, please look at the Light Warriors BOOTCAMP
  • For more, download No One Can Take That Step For You

Amanda Lamond: Free Audio Course for All Those on the Ascension Path

La Presse Galactique

French-English Translation available

PAO: Galactic Activation Webinars

  • Join Our Monthly Webinars
    with Spectacular Special Guest

Spiritual Counselling

  • Releasing old patterns of limitation.
  • Remembering, embodying, and expressing your true Self

Len Satov
SourceLight – Seeing you home
http://www.lensatov.com/

Beyond Being Human

Greg Bourdon, Life Coach

Greg Bourdon

Professional Life Coaching

Los Angeles, CA
Mobile & Text: 818-601-1307

[email protected]

The Spirit Cafe, Council of Love

  • Join the Council of Love’s Spirit Cafe

Kees de Graaff: Somehow I’ll Find My Way Home

https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/22Somehow-Ill-Find-My-Way-Home22-Tribute-to-All-Lightworkers.mp4

All of life is embarked on the same one journey – from God to God – a voyage of Self-discovery

How Energy Reaches Us – and Why

Where does the energy come from that uplifts and transmutes us?

Divine Mother: Not in My Plan?

  • Divine Mother: [I am speaking about] those in … positions where control and abuse of power have been rampant. That will not be the platform [from] which integration of the various galaxies [into the new, interdimensional region of space] takes place. That is not the Plan.
  • I know very clearly, Sweet One, as do you, if it is not [in] my Plan, then it will not occur. …
  • Make no mistake, … Love will win because that has been my Plan always.
  • (The Divine Mother in “Enter the Delegations – Part 2/3,” May 5, 2019, at http://goldenageofgaia.com/2019/05/05/enter-the-delegations-part-2-3/.)

The Pattern of the Mother

  • This universe is designed around the pattern of the Divine Mother. What is that pattern?
  • Creation, preservation, transformation = love building, love preserving, love dissolving = inbreath, pause, outbreath = rajas, sattwa, thamas (gunas) = Akar, Ukar, Makar (Aum) = Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva (Trimurthy)
  • One more?
  • Father, Son, and Holy Ghost = Brahman, Atman, and Shakti

The Mother’s Clarion Call to All of Humanity!

This is my clarion call to all of humanity to embrace love, to embrace truth, to embrace peace…

The Divine Mother’s Mandate

  • Build what is divinely beautiful. I give you my divine authority to do so. I will guide you. I will help you. But I entrust this to you as well. …
  • We are helping you. That gateway is open and you are being flooded and you are being assisted and you will be assisted every step of the way.
  • (“Transcript ~ The Divine Mother: Take Up Your Divine Authority, AHWAA, February 23, 2017,” February 28, 2017.)
  • On the Divine Plan for Ascension.

Spiritual Advice in Troubled Times

  • The Arcturian Group explains….

Bring It Back to the Love

  • Beloved child, son of my heart, [Ascension, spiritual evolution] is only about love, about the many expressions, about the many forms.
  • And truly of anchoring and being nothing but the love, in intellect, in wisdom, in sharing, in adventure, in relationship.
  • It can only be [that way] when you continue to bring all adventures, all arguments, all explorations back to the love.
  • (The Divine Mother in a personal reading with Steve Beckow through Linda Dillon, April 30, 2019; also at http://goldenageofgaia.com/2019/06/01/the-divine-mother-it-is-all-a-journey-of-love/).

Do not Venture Where There is No Love

  • Do not venture where there is no love. Because, if there is no love, then there is no truth. And if there is no truth, there will not be peace and [peace], Sweet One, is the Plan.
  • (Archangel Michael in a  personal reading with Steve Beckow through Linda Dillon, June 17, 2020.)

Archangel Michael: Lead or Leave a Vacuum


If no [lightworker] steps forward into [leadership] ...

Archangel Michael: Do not Get Caught in the Drama of White Hats or Black Hats

  • Beloved ones, do not allow yourselves to be distracted, yes, by the chaos….
  • Do not get caught in the drama of white hats or black hats, or good guys or bad guys. All beings are birthed directly from the Heart of One…. (“Archangel Michael: Do not Get Caught in the Drama of White Hats or Black Hats,” Nov. 12, 2019; see here.

Archangel Gaia on Our Mission on Earth

  • Archangel Gaia said
  • “I am now telling you what your mission is on Earth – it is to be an angel on Earth.
  • “You do not have to change the people around you; you do not have to get involved in politics, or that kind of activity.
  • “What you are meant to do here as a lightworker is to anchor a certain vibration.”
  • (Gaia, ”Earth Speaks: Your Mission on Earth,” through Pamela Kribbe, March 13, 2022, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2022/03/13/earth-speaks-your-mission-on-earth/.)

Ronna Vezane ~ Archangel Michael’s Gift: New Age Creed

Werner Erhard on Responsibility

“Responsibility begins with the willingness to take the stand that one is cause in the matter of one’s life. It is a declaration not an assertion, that is, it is a context from which one chooses to live. Responsibility is not burden, fault, praise, blame, credit, shame or guilt. In responsibility, there is no….”  (Read more…)

GAoG – Spiritual or Political? Michael Answers

Mission Statement of the Golden Age of Gaia

Spiritual Experiences that Have Shaped My Life

Inner Realms Podcast, No. 9: Steve Beckow

An enjoyable discussion of spiritual experiences with Amin Jaberansari, from 2023

On a Personal Note

  • I’m neither qualified to be a spiritual teacher nor do I wish to be one.
  • I’m a writer who wishes to share his views with you on subjects of mutual interest and listen to yours as lightworker equals and spiritual adults.

Copyright © 2025 The Golden Age Of Gaia

Copyright © 2025 · Dynamik-Gen on