Credit: Flickr Creative Commons – Marco Raaphorst

American youth are slowly realizing that the old system is broken, and no longer holds the answer to all their dreams and desires. We’re discovering that stable, satisfying careers can be found outside the offices and factories around which our parents and grandparents built their lives. We’re acknowledging that the pursuit of bigger, better, and faster things have plunged our country into a time of despair and difficulty. We’re convinced that business as usual isn’t an option any longer–but what’s the alternative?

Together, we’re learning that instead of waiting for politicians and corporations to fix the system, it’s possible to create a better one of our own, right under their noses. A new way of living, in which access is valued over ownership, experience is valued over material possessions, and “mine” becomes “ours” so everyone’s needs are met without waste.

If these ideas get your blood pumping, there’s good news: young people all over the world are already making them a reality. It’s calledcollaborative consumption, (or the sharing economy) and it’s changing the way we work, play, and interact with each other. It’s fueled by the instant connection and communication of the internet, yet it’s manifesting itself in interesting ways offline too.

If you’re ready to connect with people who can help you save money, pursue your passions, and reduce waste, here’s a quick-start guide to your sharing experience:

1. Remove all items from the box and assess

Sit down with yourself (or some friends) and talk about what you’ve got, what you need, and what you could live without. Take stock of what you’d be willing to share, rent, or give away. Write down all the things you really need to be productive/happy/connected. Then, cross out all the things that you want just to have them, and highlight all the things that involve a valuable experience. Now you have a list you can tackle through sharing.

2. Connect to the power source

The collaborative consumption movement empowers people to thrive despite economic climate. Instead of looking to the government or corporations to tell us what we want or create a solution for our problems, we take action to meet our own needs in a creative fashion. This is our power source. Start looking for ways to share at school, on community billboards, by asking friends, or use the resources below:

Housing

• Roomates.com – A roomate finder and roomates search service which covers thousands of cities nationwide.
• How to Start a Housing Co-op – one of the best affordable housing options around, and shared food expenses and cooking can increase your savings.
• Guide to Sharing a House – buying a home by yourself may be out of reach in high cost areas, but shared ownership might be the ticket.
• Cohousing Directory – Cohousing is homeownership in a neighborhood that shares.
• Craigslist – find almost anything including a house or housemate on Craigslist.

Social Food

• Grubly, Eat With Me and Housefed are the Airbnb for meals. Use them to find or host a meal in your neighborhood. Never eat alone!
• MamaBake – Large batch group cooking saves time and money, not to mention it’s fun!
• Local Harvest – A massive directory that helps you find farmers’ markets, CSA’s, and other sources of sustainably grown food in your area.
• Neighborhood Fruit – find and offer free fruit to your neighbors with this site and iPhone app.
• How to Share a Vegetable Garden
• How to Start A Farmers’ Market
• Host a Baby Food Swap

Personal Finance

• Lending Club – An online financial community that brings together creditworthy borrowers and savvy investors so that both can benefit financially.
• Zopa – Where people get together to lend and borrow money directly with each other, sidestepping the banks for a better deal.
• Prosper – A peer-to-peer lending site that allows people to invest in each other in a way that is financially and socially rewarding.
• SmartyPig – social savings bank that enables you to save for specific goals and engage friends and family to contribute.
• How to Save Money by Sharing

Entrepreneurship / Work

• Kickstarter – A crowd-funding site powered by a unique all-or-nothing funding method where projects must be fully-funded or no money changes hands.
• Profounder – A site that makes it easy for your community to contribute financially to your business, so they’re literally invested in your success.
• BetterMeans – Use open-source decision-making rules, and self-organizing principles to run your real-world projects.
• Task Rabbit – A service that enables you to outsource your tasks and deliveries (Boston and San Francisco Bay area only…for now).
• Use the coworking wiki, Loosecubes or Liquidspace to find a friendly place to cowork. Coworking is a flexible and community-oriented workspace option for business travelers, independent workers, and entrepreneurs.
• How to Find a Job Using Social Media
• The Shareable Job Search Search
• How to Start a Coworking Space
• A Guide to Casual Coworking – Why not cowork anywhere? Here’s the definitive guide.
• How to Create Your Own Green Job
• How to Make A Franchise Shareable

Travel

• CouchSurfing – An international non-profit network that connects travelers with locals in over 230 countries and territories around the world.
• AirBnB – Connects people who have space to spare with those who are looking for a place to stay, all over the world.
• iStopOver – Homeowners worldwide rent out space in their homes to travelers looking for unique accommodations.
• Park at myHouse – Provides affordable and fine-free parking by enabling property-owners to rent out their empty driveways, garages, car parks etc. to drivers needing somewhere to park.
• Roomorama – An online marketplace for short term rentals all over the world.
• Tripping – Tripping enables you to connect safely with locals who will introduce you to their towns, their cultures, their lives and their friends.
• How To Swap Cities – a guide on how to swap offices with someone from another city inspired by SwapYourShop.
• Submate – a Parisian startup that helps you discover new people and things to do as defined by your regular train and subway commutes.

Land / Gardening

• HyperLocavore – Share yards, seeds, tools and good times growing food!
• Shared Earth – Get free access to land and grow what you love, share some of the produce with the land owner and keep the rest.
• Tool libraries – check out this handy directory of tool libraries.
• Landshare – UK-based service that connects those who have land to share with those who need land for cultivating food.
• How to Create Your Own Seed-Lending Library
• How to start a Crop Mob – Crop mobs allow you to get and give gardening help.
• How to Share a Vegetable Garden

Transportation

• Carsharing directory – find carsharing service providers in your area with this international list.
• Zimride, GoLoco, eRideShare – Find a ride or offer a ride on these top ridesharing platforms.
• ZipCar – the largest fleet-based carsharing service in the world.
• RelayRides, Getaround, Just Share It, and Spride – Rent cars to or from neighbors using the leaders of the peer to peer carsharing movement.
• Weeels – order cabs and share rides with this smartphone app.
• Avego – Avego matches drivers and riders in real time as they travel.
• Taxi2 – Matches travelers who are going from the airport to the same or nearby final destination.
• How To Share a Car With A Stranger
• How To Be a Carfree Family

Media (Books, Movies, Games, Music)

• BookMooch – Lets you give away books you no longer need in exchange for books you really want.
• Swap.com – An online swap marketplace for books, movies, music and games.
• Goozex – A unique trading platform for video games and movies.
• SwapaDVD – Trade DVDs for free.
• Paperback Swap – Trade paperback books for free.
• SwapaCD – Trade CDs for free.

Clothing

• Check The S.W.A.P. Team, ClothingSwap.com, Swap for Good, and The Swapaholics for clothing swaps near you.
• Or host your own swap using this guide, How to Throw a Community Swap Meet.
• Use Wear Today Gone Tomorrow or Renttherunway to rent authentic designer clothing for up to 90 percent off retail prices.
• Swapstyle.com – An interactive fashion website where members can swap, rather than buy, unlimited designer clothes with each other.
• Try Bag Borrow & Steal and Fashionhire – to rent designer handbags and accessories at affordable prices.
• And when the time comes to start a family, use ThredUp to swap children’s clothing and toys with other parents.

Redistribution Sites (where uneeded stuff finds a loving home)

• Freecycle – The original grassroots organization for giving and getting free stuff in your town.
• craigslist – The ultimate free classifieds site with categories for free stuff, barters, and shares.
• eBay – International online auction that allows you to buy from and sell to other individuals.
• ecoSharing – The first sharing website that lets us share what we own with people we know and trust: our friends on facebook.
• SpiltStuff – A new site that organizes local communities to buy in bulk and “split” the goods and the cost, thus reducing waste and unnecessary consumerism.

Renting and sharing of general goods where you live

• Rentalic, Neighborgoods, Keepio, and SnapGoods are leading peer to peer rental and sharing marketplaces.

Campus

• Chegg – Rent expensive textbooks on the cheap.
• Better World Books – Save big on used textbooks.
• Textbookflix, – A system that lets you rent text books in the same way that you rent movies from Netflix.
• Students for Free Culture – An international, chapter-based student organization that promotes the public interest in intellectual property and telecommunications policy.
• Bloomsbury College – Crowdsorced learning for the entrepreneurial student.
• CafeScribe – A new service that lets you download electronic copies of your textbook, add friends, and share your notes.
• Notely – A collection of online tools (including a Facebook app) designed to help busy students organize their hectic lives.
• Class Notes – A Facebook app that enables students to share handwritten or printed notes from class.
• Free Technology Academy – free college classes on open source technology and standards.
• Open Courseware – free college course materials offered by scores of top universities from around the world.

If you don’t see the sharing solution you need, check out our huge list of how to share guides on Shareable. Or add resources you know about in comments.

3. Press the power button

Once you discover local opportunities for sharing and collaborating, it’s time to add the power: you. Get involved. Create a profile on sharing/renting/bartering site and actually list some stuff you could trade. Contact the moderator of a local offline sharing group and offer up your goods or services. Collaborative consumption requires a venture into a social world, even if it’s only online; you need to get out there.

4. Sync with other devices and enjoy

Ideas like eBay, Netflix, and GameFly are pretty well-known examples of sharing, but it’s important to remember that options exist offline as well. Sure, the internet makes it safe for us to share with strangers, but that doesn’t mean you should forget about the satisfaction of sharing face-to-face.Coworking brings collaboration into your professional life; a local food co-opbrings sharing into your pantry, and skill-sharing communities bring comraderie to your weekend hobbies.

Don’t be afraid to let sharing/bartering/collaborating go viral in other areas of your life as well. You’ll discover, as Rachel Botsman does in What’s Mine is Yours, that “over time, these experiences create a deep shift in consumer mindset. Consumption is no longer an asymmetrical activity of endless acquisition but a dynamic push and pull of giving and collaborating in order to get what you want. Along the way, the acts of collaboration and giving become an end in itself.”

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What are we missing? Please let us know in comments.

This guide appears in the new Shareable ebook collection Share or Die, which is now available in downloadable and free online forms. For the next article in Share or Die, Arianna’s “Stranger Dinners” click here.