PEOPLE ARE JUST NATURALLY FALLING INTO A CONSECRATED MIND-SET

This generation was reserved for this.  This kind of thinking will help them in the transition to the next phase of living where we simply help people to help people:

A group in Lake Stevens is sharing things with their neighbors via a social experiment.

(Photo: KING)

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LAKE STEVENS, Wash. – Vicki Perry tears up when you ask her about what some of her neighbors have done.
"She hands me a basket and it's got stuff in it for my dogs," she said as she remembers one of the things a community member gave to her. "It makes me cry even now because people care."
Through Facebook, Vicki is now connected to hundreds of her neighbors in her community via a social experiment called Buy Nothing. The goal is to "give freely, share creatively and post anything you'd like to give away, lend or share among neighbors."
They watched it flourish on Bainbridge Island and now the Lake Stevens group has grown from 40 people about a year ago to more than a thousand, according to Terry Bockovich who, like Vicki, is one of the administrators of the group.
"It's a very subversive way of interacting with your neighbors while staying away from a market-based economy," Bockovich said. "We have so many things in abundance and our neighbors live relatively nearby us, so we can always borrow a cup of sugar, but this is on a much grander scale of doing it."
The group has started a lending library which can equip neighbors with everything to books, kayaks, tubes, yoga or Little League gear, to wedding gowns for brides-to-be.
"Tags still on. It's so cool," Bockovich explained about the bridal lending service. "We see brides probably once or twice a week that come and try things on."
She said a big part of their goal is to be hyper-local and to reduce their carbon footprint.
"We really try to stay away from need-based asking because we don't want to separate ourselves economically by status," she explained. "We are a trusting group. Because we are hyper-local, we know each other."
On Sunday, she, Vicki and Jocie Pendell drove around the Lake Stevens/Granite Falls area to secretly hand out things people need by dropping it off of their porches. They started doing that right after Christmas.
"Somebody had made a comment - oh you're so ninja-like. Nobody sees you drop them off and so the ninja baskets just took off," Pendell said. "When I do a basket, I don't get those things. Everyone else gives them to me to put in the basket to deliver."
Pendell said at the heart of what they're doing is the community.
"We're empty nesters at home and this is what I was missing," she said.
Perry agreed.
"Technology is awesome, but we now live so spread out from everybody and we're so busy going to work and coming home. We've got our faces in our phones and our faces in our computers that we don't talk to each other anymore - not face to face," she said. "[Through connections] you see that there are good people in the world and there are people who will help take care of each other."
To learn more about the group or find connections in your neighborhood, go to the Buy Nothing website.