As a child I remember watching Mr. Rogers Neighborhood like many kids of my generation and being fascinated by all the people he knew who lived close by and came to visit. There was a time, or so I am told, when we all knew our neighbors. When we would take a walk outside and know more than someone’s name, but intimate details about who they were and the members of their families, when they would come by for tea and they would invite you over for oatmeal cookies. Today it is rare if my neighbors say hello to me when I walk my dog and I barely know the woman who lives next door. However, there is one woman who is trying to change that. Her name is Micki Krimmel and she is single handedly making the world a neighborly place.

Krimmel is the founder of Neighborgoods.net, an interactive social community where you share items with your neighbors.

Neighborgoods

Think of it as a cross between Craigslist and Facebook. Whether you are looking to borrow an item or you have an item you are willing to let someone borrow or rent, you can put in your zip code and see what people in your area are sharing. Once you sign up you can add items to share or request items to borrow. The idea is that by sharing you not only save money, but you help strengthen your ties to the community.

Krimmel got the idea for Neighborgoods a few years ago when she was getting ready to take a trip to Thailand, “I needed a backpack for the trip. I asked around to see if anyone had one I could borrow, but I wasn’t able to find one. So I spent about $200 on a backpack I knew I would use only once. I realized that was terribly inefficient. I took stock of all the stuff I owned and realized that was true for most things. I would spend a lot of money on something I really didn’t need to own. I just needed access for a small period of time. In fact, 80% of the stuff we own gets used less than once a month. I decided to build something to help get more value out of stuff we own.”

Prior to founding Neighborgoods, Krimmel was working at Participant Media in online community development, “Back when I was working there it was called Participant Productions and it was a brand new film company founded by Jeff Skoll, former president of eBay. Participant’s mission is to affect social change through media. I was the 3rd employee so I was able to work directly with Jeff Skoll and the small team to form the online strategy for the company. I managed the creation of the company’s first online social action community and also led the social media efforts for Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’ So my background is firmly rooted in online community building and I have a lot of experience in the green space. After leaving Participant, I continued in online community development for various startups and media companies until I started working on NeighborGoods full time early last year.”

For Krimmel, Los Angeles was the perfect city for her community start up. “Los Angeles has been a great place to start this project because people are dying for a sense of local community. There is a huge trend happening nationwide as people in urban areas are looking for ways to connect locally. There are more farmers’ markets in the U.S. than Wal-Mart’s! We are a part of that trend and it’s been really great to see the impact in Los Angeles. In my neighborhood, we’ve built a really strong social network via NeighborGoods. We now have a local support system. We watch each other’s houses when we’re out of town, walk each other’s dogs, etc. It’s made a real tangible impact in my neighborhood.”

Los Angeles continues to be the biggest community that is sharing mostly because it is where Krimmel started it. “Our other biggest areas are New York City and San Francisco, though we have people sharing in every state now! It can take a few months to get a city going.” The site continues to expand and Krimmel is doing everything she can to continue to grow. “We’re working really hard to constantly improve the service based on feedback and how folks are using it. We’re going to make it easier for groups of people to share and we’ll be working with organizations of all sizes over the coming year. Five years from now, NeighborGoods will support all kinds of local sharing – goods, services, information. It will be a great resource for neighborhoods of all shapes and sizes.”

The idea of community and sharing is part of a larger trend with other online sites popping up like couchsurfing.com, a non profit that promotes cultural exchange by matching travelers with couches they can crash on and zopa.com a UK peer to peer money lending site. Krimmel believes tide of consumerism and money making us happy is be turning and we are looking to lead fuller lives through being a bigger part of the communities we live in. “NeighborGoods is just a small part of this larger trend. It’s not just about the economy. Happiness research is a growing field and we are learning the science behind what makes us happy. People are looking for more fulfilling lives and we are learning that it comes from community – not consumerism. People are going out of their way to support local food and local economies. Alternative currencies, time-banks, and reputation-based systems are growing as means to trade. This is all part of a community-based groundswell of activity that goes well beyond the dreary economy.”

In the short time Neighborgoods has been an active online presence, Krimmel has learned a lot about what is working within the site. “We’ve learned so much since we started about how people share and why. Surprisingly, it’s been really easy to get people to share their stuff. People really like to share. It feels good to help a neighbor. Our biggest hurdles have not been in the obvious places. We’ve been reacting to feedback and usage to simplify the service and make it easier for people to do what they want to do – connect with people nearby.”

The items available to borrow are pretty diverse, from Halloween costumes, turkey fryers, even someone’s pet Chihuahua, you pretty much can find anything and everything on the site. The most bizarre item Krimmel has seen on the site? “Someone has live chickens available for borrowing. So you can try them out for a weekend before making the commitment. I love that!”

To start borrowing chickens or any items today, go to Neighborgoods.net, sign up and go meet your neighbors. I actually just signed up and will follow up with how the sharing and borrowing experiences went in a later post. Mr. Rogers certainly would have appreciated a site like this.