community action Archives

Free trade is taking on a whole new meaning in Toronto, with new community groups popping up like the ever-popular Bunz and the Toronto Tool Library. Trading and lending items without an exchange of dollars is growing in popularity in a city where everything costs money. Why are these groups coming out of the proverbial woodwork of online social forums such as Facebook and new trading apps? Why now?

Frankly, the millennial generation is pissed off. They are entering the job market after spending thousands on university degrees with no prospect of employment in sight. If you want to forward yourself in a career, you need to live in proximity to the few jobs there are. These locations typically have inflated rents and low availability. Either that, or you are living with your parents far past the ripe age of 18 and making an excruciatingly long commute downtown because there is no other option.

Enter Bunz. This trading group was originally launched by millennial Emily Bitze in 2013 when she couldn’t afford ingredients for pasta and appealed to her Facebook community, sparking the idea for the online forum. It began as a secret society of like-minded folk who would trade items without using money, commonly using TTC tokens and tall cans of beer as collateral. Quickly though, Bunz grew into a massive online community of people living in Toronto looking to save money by participating in trades. Bunz now has an online Facebook presence of 46,000 people and a private app was launched just last year.

Bunz is much more than a business. It is a cultural symbol of change. The online trading forum of people in search of (ISO) needed items in exchange for others represents the need to stop buying and start sharing. The consumerist approach to wealth is shrivelling up as people move away from the post-World-War-Two desire to own items. Instead, it is time to begin understanding the true source of power and wealth in any given city; shared community.

In a way, having no money brings the truest sense of wealth in the Bunz community. When you participate in a trade, you will often come out with a new item you needed and a friendship resulting from sharing goods. People often use the Bunz page to post about having a bad day, or if they have lost their keys. The result is the group banning together to help those people in need — and keys are found almost every time. That feeling of being cared for by complete strangers simply because you had the guts to reach out in a healthy way is worth more than 10 unaffordable coach bags.

Toronto is a bustling city centre and people are constantly moving into “the Big Smoke” with little more on them other than their bags and big city dreams. It can be quite lonely and expensive to move into Toronto when you don’t know anyone. Bunz provides a forum to make friends and obtain much needed-items for settling in. It gives new arrivals a sense of community and immediately rejects the notion that Toronto is “a big cold city”.

Lending libraries have popped up too, including the Toronto Tool Library and the Toronto Seed Library. You can borrow tools without having to purchase them and you can also participate in workshops. The Toronto Seed Library allows people to borrow seeds and return them after the season ends, which promotes local growing on a budget. Lending libraries are truly sustainable entities, helping balance the bank account and save the planet in one go.

So, what if we could take this movement and make Toronto the trade capital in North America? There have been whispers of the possibility of a mall completely dedicated to lending libraries and trade zones. It is a magnificent notion — to go to the mall and not drop hundreds on pointless items. Instead, you can walk out with exactly what you need in that moment.

Bunz and lending libraries are the beginning of a great movement into a hopeful future of consumerism. As a millennial, I’m proud to be a part of it. Are you?

Quite a few people in the Twitterverse and beyond were shocked today by the transit video we released.

It was created by our publisher (and tireless transit advocate) Sarah Thomson who took to Facebook last night to announce that Women’s Post had “the video” and it would be appearing on Women’s Post’s website today at noon.

Supporters of transit initiatives in Toronto and those who see Sarah tick by in their Facebook and Twitter feeds regularly were familiar with the video she was talking about – a video where she sings a cover of Pink’s Just Give Me a Reason with lyrics re-written to showcase Toronto’s issues with securing reliable transit for the city and asking Torontonians to do what they can to support the Big Move.

A little bit silly? Of course. A conversation we need to be having? Definitely.

The video opens with a smoke filled room and a character holding a pipe before a segue into shots of Toronto’s congested streets and regular people holding cards asking for help in relieving transit stresses and commuter problems in our fair city. The message is clear: we need to move past the haze of drug scandals that have Toronto politics in a vice grip and get back to reality. Our city and the people in it are stuck immobile by distraction after distraction and are suffering the consequences of inaction on a daily basis.

What happened next couldn’t have driven the point home any better. Overnight Toronto’s hashtags and feeds jumped to the collective conclusion that the video going up today was of Rob Ford smoking crack.

Their shock came when the video turned out to be a song about transit.

My shock came in the immediate aftermath of the video going live. The message left in our comments, on Twitter, and on YouTube was that this was a waste of time, we need to get back to “real” issues about Rob Ford’s reckless personal life.

My shock was that a scandal plagued mayor has so thoroughly damaged the civic and political landscape of Toronto to the point where the people of Toronto can’t even clearly see that the most pressing issue to us right now, to our children, and to our future as a viable world-class city isn’t what people at City Hall have in their pipes, it is what their circus of distraction is preventing us from becoming.

This week boring machines began working on the largest transit project Toronto has seen in half a century. Unfortunately, the number of people tuned into stories about the Eglinton LRT pales in comparison to the number of people tuning in daily to see an elected official deny, dodge, and destroy politics at City Hall.

My suggestion to my fellow Torontonians is to take a cue from Sarah’s video. Wave the smoke out of your face and move on. Focus on what is important, do everything you can to make City Hall, Queen’s Park, and Parliament Hill work for you by speaking out about transit, urban development, bike lanes, the Gardiner, and everything else that is currently being ignored by the Mayor’s office. While we can waste time arguing over what kind of dust coats the Mayor’s desk it is quite clear that it isn’t being used at all for the municipal issues that need to be addressed.

Taking a stand on the problems faced by Torontonians instead of the demons faced by Toronto’s mayor is the only way we can step forward into the future.

The politics of Toronto aren’t broken, perhaps bent, but certainly cracked. What we need to do now is fill that crack with our voices. Our next big move as a city shouldn’t be into the depths of crack houses, it should be into the communities that need accessible transit, stitching together the tapestry of our city with busses, light rail, subways, proper highways, and bike lanes.

Together we can make it work.

You can follow Travis on Twitter at @TravMyers.