One of Grace’s mommy friends told her about an interesting online (but yet local!) community called FreeCycle. The free service is basically a collection of local residents in your area who are part of a larger collective “recycling” community. The idea is to recycle what you don’t want and give them to someone else who may find good use for them. Almost every major city in the world has a FreeCycle group (yes, even Freehold, NJ, Murdza!).
I thought this is better than Craigslist in that when you join this group (more than 5000 members for San Jose), you know what you give/get would be free in the spirit of recycling and sharing. Grace got a saucer and a doorway jumper for Bryan when someone was giving them away. I also posted a “wanted” entry for a keyboard tray for my desk, and immediately someone offered me one for free! But it turned out that the tray is kind of heavy (all metal!) for my cheap IKEA desk…. 🙁
All in all, it’s a pretty cool community of folks… And I am glad, for once, this is not a corporate commercial venture (something I can see eBay doing). The website relies on ads and donations to keep going.