Repurpose an afghan, Stan. Trade out a shirt, Curt. Don’t need corduroy, Joy. Just listen to me.

Some tricks for building collective wardrobes are as old-fangled as Garfunkel’s turtleneck, while others are new. Here are five of the best.

1. Leasing

Gone are the days when the only rentable clothing was regrettable men’s prom wear. Now, you can lease high-end dresses from Rent The Runway and Lending Luxury, and designer purses from Bag Borrow or Steal.

While this is dandy for formal events, if you’re like me, your idea of everyday luxury is a shirt with no visible holes and/or marinara stains. Renting something for daily wear seems far-fetched, obtuse. Not to mention, not-so-sustainable. If you’re so caught up in trends that you need to constantly update your wardrobe, the clothing selection’s rentability will diminish faster than your wallet and green cred.

Two sites that bridge the gap nicely are Mine for Nine for maternity rentals and thredUP for kid’s clothes. While we obviously don’t want y’all getting pregnant just so you can rent some flexi-pants and OshKosh B’goshes, it makes sense to quit buying clothing for rapidly changing bodies.

2. Swapping

If you’re late to the clothes swap epidemic, you’re really missing out. Basically, you invite a bunch of pals of various shapes and sizes to come over to your place with their underutilized, undesired wares. It’s a fun, lovely way to get rid of clothes that still might hold appeal to one of your friends. There are a lot of how-to guides on the internet. This Frisky piece does a succinct job, while this O Magazine article lays down the laws. I’d just emphasize one ingredient: wine.

There are online options for swapping as well like Swapstyle and Rehash. Here’s how it works: You upload images of whatever you’re looking to swap, then offer to trade or buy other members’ stuff, and ship to each other once you’ve reached an agreement. That sounds dandy on paper, but a perusal of the selections left me feeling … uninspired. You’d have to spend a fair amount of time digging in order to find something worthwhile. At that point, why not just hit up your local secondhand store? With the cost and footprint of shipping, it’s not like you’re doing the Earth or yourself much of a favor.

3. Sharing skills

Come rain or shine, Michael Swaine mends clothing for free once a month on the streets of San Francisco’s Tenderloin District. He teaches interested parties how to fix clothing and lends an ear to strangers who quickly become regulars. If you’re interested in sharing your skills, take it from Swaine, who has been doing this for over 11 years, and be realistic. By doing something once a month, rather than daily or weekly, it’s less likely to feel like an obligation.

Or, if you like working in a group, check to see if your city has a fixer collective or repair cafe. If you’re feeling extra ambitious and have a group of like-minded, crafty friends, start your own. Here are some tips from and a tour of Fixer’s Collective NYC.

4. Sharing designs

Whatever your craft (or lack thereof), there’s likely a community out there sharing ideas, tips, patterns, and projects. Knitter and open-source proponent Amy Twigger Holroyd is a fan of Ravelry. Crochet? You’re covered. I recommend poking around different websites for a feel of their aesthetics, mood, and community.

I’m a fan of Kollabora for its neat design and careful curation. Part of its crispness, though, stems from the fact that it sells the supplies for user-generated craft projects. That will either make things easier for you or sound a bit too capitalistic. Like I said, poke around.

5. Your grandmother’s closet

While we tend to think of sharing as a temporary or permanent exchange of underutilized or unwanted goods, vintage is a “kind of covert long-term leasing,” note Kate Fletcher and Lynda Grose in Fashion and Sustainability. New-to-you shopping means buying gently used, loved clothing that someone gave up and — hopefully — putting it back into the secondhand system once you’re done with it.

And indeed, vintage shops are brimming with clothing that was made before the days of cheap fashion designed to not last the season. By only purchasing vintage or high-quality new clothing, we can pay forward all the good times those ’80s leather jackets gave us and ensure future generations have tangible pieces of our fashion culture beyond grainy Instagram photos.

——

Obviously this list is incomplete, but you don’t want me to break into bad Paul Simon puns again, do you? Are there any sharing websites or systems you recommend?

Christina Ruiz and Helen Ochoa don’t seem to have much in common. Ruiz is a stylish, photogenic fashion school grad who owns and operates TopShelf Boutique, San Francisco’s first fashion truck. Ochoa is a single mother of three, an immigrant from Guatemala who lacked a credit score and struggled for years to find a decent apartment for herself and her children. But their differences are not so vast as they seem. Before she opened TopShelf, Ruiz, too, was financially flailing, suffering from a bad credit score that prevented her from financing her mobile shop. Without access to traditional loans or credit, both women turned to the same place to realize their dreams: San Francisco’s Mission Asset Fund.

The Mission Asset Fund is like a financial version of a potluck dinner: Everyone contributes something of their own, but each individual also benefits from what everyone else brings to the table. Its most popular financial product, “lending circles,” formalize the peer-to-peer lending practices common in low-income and immigrant communities. Members of a lending circle contribute small monthly amounts to a common pot, which is then loaned to a member in need. The borrower makes payments on the loan just like he or she would a bank loan, only there’s no interest or fees.

Borrowers are held accountable by the community — lending circles often include friends and even family members, so the power of peer pressure ensures timely payments. Mission Asset Fund reports the payments to credit bureaus, allowing borrowers to build credit histories and win access to traditional loans. According to the fund, the credit scores of lending circle participants have increased by an average of 49 points through the program.

And if someone doesn’t pay it back? Well, it doesn’t happen. When a borrower is struggling with payments, Mission Asset Fund sets him or her up with intensive one-on-one financial counseling and resets their payment schedule. So far, the approach has worked every time: Spokesperson Tara Robinson says the lending circles’ repayment rate stands at 100 percent.

The program is similar in philosophy to Bangladesh-based Grameen Bank, founded by Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus and a pioneer of offering microcredit to the poor, as well as recent American peer-to-peer lending programs like Prosper and Lending Club. While the latter two for-profit companies charge interest and require borrowers to meet certain credit standards, the basic goals — cutting out the Wall Street middlemen and leveraging the power of human interconnectivity to promote broad financial health — is shared by all.

The origins of the Mission Asset Fund are as distinctive as the people it serves. In the early 2000s, Levi Strauss — yep, the jeans people — closed its factory in San Francisco’s Mission district. The factory had opened in 1906, shortly after a major earthquake devastated the city, and for nearly a century it helped propel the hometown apparel company into a worldwide brand. Because of Levi’s close ties to, and deep history in, the city, it decided to do something unusual at the plant’s closure: The Levi-Strauss Foundation donated $1 million to support the predominantly Hispanic community of the Mission. A board of foundation members and local activists deliberated for several months over how best to utilize the funds, until they hit on the idea of a financial nonprofit.

The fund’s executive director, José Quiñonez, knows well the difficulties facing new immigrant families: He came to the United States from Mexico as an undocumented child, a prototypical candidate for the DREAM Act. Quiñonez earned his green card in the amnesty program of 1987 and, with papers in hand, went on to earn a bachelor’s degree from the University of California-Davis, then a master’s degree from Princeton.

With Quiñonez at the helm, the Mission Asset Fund has been able to tailor its financial products to new immigrants, including setting up lending circles specifically to cover the costs of applying for U.S. citizenship.

“Individuals that don’t have access to the financial mainstream — people who don’t have access to banks or credit unions — they basically have to create that access for themselves,” explains Quiñonez. “Social loans are traditional loans that people make with each other, they’re very traditional in immigrant communities, but those loans never get recorded or reported to the credit bureaus.” Until now.

In addition to the seed money from the Levi-Strauss Foundation, the fund has found support from a range of both institutions and individuals, including numerous mainstream financial institutions that don’t always serve the needs of low-income communities. “We get referrals from local banks,” says Robinson. “They see us as part of a continuum.”

The Citi Foundation, an offshoot of Citibank, embraced the Mission Asset Fund after officials realized their own financial literacy classes were less effective than they’d hoped. The fund recently received a $200,000 Neighborhood Builders Award from Bank of America.

Because of the loans they received from the Mission Asset Fund, both Christina Ruiz and Helen Ochoa were able to turn their lives around. Ruiz’s TopShelf Boutique has been featured in Conde Nast Traveler, on the cover of the San Francisco Examiner, even in American Airlines’ American Way magazine. She says her truck — which really resembles a hip boutique on the interior, filled with brightly colored, ultra-trendy, moderately priced apparel — offers customers “an alternative to crowded malls and other traditional shopping experiences.” (There’s also something inherently awesome about buying clothes out of a truck.)

As for Ochoa, the single mother who couldn’t find a safe and healthy apartment for her kids — well, after participating in a lending circle and taking some personal finance classes, she was able to put together both a deposit and a credit score that finally landed her a decent place. Instead of the disruptions of frequent moves or mold-borne illness, her three children have a place to study, play, and grow.

“I didn’t know anything,” Ochoa says in Spanish. “Now I have a high credit score. For me, it’s changed my life. All of it.”

With mounting school loans and the uncertainty of finding a job after graduation, 26-year-old Jenny Monfore decided to leave college early and look for alternative education. At the Driftless Folk School in Wisconsin, the Bozeman, Mont., native and massage therapist studied organic food preparation, blacksmithing, and mushroom identification — skills she hopes will augment her income and allow her to live a more independent lifestyle.

“We no longer have practical skills, we don’t know how to feed ourselves, and we’ve basically become lost,” Monfore says. “So we’re slowly building new, thoughtful communities.”

Folk school: The phrase calls to mind cloggers, birch bark hats, and strains of “If I Had a Hammer.” But these craft schools of yore are experiencing a resurgence of late, drawing young do-it-yourself homesteaders and restless baby boomers to the woods to learn about everything from organic farming to electric cars.

The folk-school movement originated in Denmark in the 1800s as an alternative educational system steeped in religion, culture, and community. In the U.S., the schools’ focus on “togetherness” morphed into the ’60s and ’70s hippie and Foxfire awakenings. They were relegated to the fringes by the subsequent corporatization of nearly everything, however, and aside from long-established schools such as the craft- and music-centered John C. Campbell Folk School in North Carolina, they disappeared.

But now, a growing interest in sustainability and the rise of craft and DIY culture, as well as unease with the current course of the economy and climate, are drawing people back into the folksy classroom.

“There’s a level of uncertainty about what the future holds for us as a society,” says Kyle Lind, a 27-year-old college graduate who recently started a 10-month internship at North House Folk School in Grand Marais, Minn. “Oil and food prices are on the rise. The cost of electricity and heat are skyrocketing. More and more people are realizing they have to know how to do for themselves.”

Last June, after doing similar work in Missoula, Mont., Lind started a business, the boldly named Morningwood Hardwoods, salvaging wood from “blow down” urban trees in Minnesota, and says he wanted to learn saw milling skills and expand into furniture making, timber framing, and boat building — the backbone of North House’s curriculum. It’s a way, he says, to break free of corporate America, to forge his own path.

North House holds 350 workshops yearly, drawing students from across the country and the globe. Executive Director Greg Wright says he fields calls weekly from people who want “the recipe” for starting a folk school in their communities. “Folk schools are resurfacing and it’s a reflection that people are conscious that change is coming,” Wright says. “The world is going to change. The paradigm we have now can’t continue to exist.”

The schools themselves have shifted focus in order to be relevant to a new generation, with a heavy focus on organic farming, sustainable communities, and green technology. In Fairbanks, Alaska, the new Folk School Fairbanks will team up with mechanical engineers at a local university that was asked to design an electric car for a manufacturer.

People enrolling in folk schools range in age from 18 to 70. Enrollment is growing among high school graduates taking a gap year before starting college. College grads are opting to spend gap years at folk school, too, in some cases using the opportunity to rethink their careers. Some students in their late 20s and mid-30s come to learn a trade or craft for a second income. Add to the mix boomers who’ve been laid off, have difficulty finding work, and are hoping to start a small business, and others who have chosen to leave careers in pursuit of a long-ignored passion, and you have a recipe for dramatic growth.

The Driftless school, which sits in a hotbed of organic farming amid the rolling hills of Viroqua, Wis., was founded in 2006 by residents who wanted to open an art school. The school (named for the local topography, which was unscathed by the glacial drift that plowed much of Wisconsin flat) now enrolls 300 students annually. Classes, which are mostly held in teacher’s homes, have expanded to include everything from farming to beekeeping to rustic bread craft. With enrollment growing each year, Driftless will eventually move to a permanent building, says Robert Schulz, one of the school’s founders.

Schulz, 37, and his wife own a 40-acre organic produce farm and built their own home. He supplements his income in the off-season by blacksmithing, making railings, door hardware, and fencing — a trade honed at the Campbell school. Nonetheless, Schulz says most of these schools aren’t advocating that students depart society for a rustic life in the woods nor to totally give up day jobs.

Rather, Schulz, Lind, and Fairbanks’ John Manthei see the movement as more of an awakening, an awareness that we’ve drifted a bit too far from nature. Not as doe-eyed as their earlier ’60s counterparts, they know the world won’t become one happy commune. Still, they point to a budding homesteading movement in both urban and rural areas as evidence that these ideas are gaining traction.

“No one is saying this is going to take over,” Schulz says. “For those, however, who are feeling as though something isn’t quite right, that they’re not self-sufficient enough, not creative — they are the ones who will find us.”

Neal Gorenflo is the founder and publisher of Shareable, a website dedicated to promoting the sharing economy in all its forms, from car sharing to tool-lending libraries and even pet sharing. A former corporate up-and-comer, he quit his job in 2004 and vowed to “make a world where people felt like they were part of something meaningful.”

Gorenflo chatted with Grist earlier this month as part of our two-month exploration of the sharing economy — and now, he’s offered to talk to you, too. Join us this Friday at 1 p.m. Eastern (10 a.m. Pacific), for a live chat, moderated by Grist Senior Editor Greg Hanscom.

Got something to share? Click here to join the chat.

Amy Twigger Holroyd approaches fashion with sharing in mind. In one project, she created garments that could be shared by friends with different body types. By making clothes that don’t constrict in places where people vary the most, a size six could potentially share her sweater with a size 16. Yep. Her project basically takes the magic out of Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. (Unless you count buying a pricey sweater with the express intent of sharing it with friends a different kind of magic, which I certainly do.)

But Holroyd’s projects go beyond one-size-fits-all couture. Her PhD research on “fashion as a commons” is an exploration of how to democratize and disrupt the clothing industry. “If you’re not able to make, you’re dependent on buying,” she says. “And if you’re dependent on buying, you’re dependent on what those people [in the fashion industry] have chosen — the quality of it, the design of it, the aesthetic of it.”

And so, under the umbrella label Keep & Share, she teaches folks how to fix and knit their own clothing, creates and sells long-lasting, sharable clothing, and hacks into cheap knitwear to send a message about the industry. Thanks to the independence of PhD funding, Holroyd is trying to figure out how to make this work in the real world without, you know, tanking her business in the meantime.

Holyroyd has been working and thinking about sustainable fashion since 2003 and describes her job as “designer-maker-researcher — lots of hyphens.” I was curious about Holroyd’s experiments and called her up. Here’s our edited conversation.

Q. I first came across your work with sharable clothing in Fashion and Sustainability. Judging from your website, your work is much broader than that.

A. My design philosophy has always been about trying to help people get more out of each item of clothing, but to do it in a gentle way. There are some approaches like creating clothes to be multifunctional — it’s one thing then it transforms into something else. Whereas, I have always tried to take a more gentle approach. I try to create things that can be shared between purposes. So a garment which you feel comfortable and happy wearing in different situations. And also things that can be worn by different people so they can be handed down over time.

The extreme version of that — in the store, there’s a piece called “Cuff in a blanket.” It’s basically a blanket with one sleeve. The idea is that anybody can wear it. The western ideal of clothing is couture: One garment being made to fit one woman perfectly at one moment in her life. A more eastern approach to clothing is you have a big piece of fabric and you wrap it around you in some way. Therefore the whole concept of fit is completely different. Having a more open approach to fit allows things to be shared much more.

If you want things to be shared, you come up against the assumption that things will go out of fashion and become undesirable. I’ve been exploring how to design garments which are not classic in a classic, boring way, but which retain their interest over time.

Q. You describe your PhD work as “fashion as a commons.” Explain what you mean by that.

A. My research came out of doing workshops —  teaching people to knit or teaching them more advanced skills — and the conversations we would have. I felt quite naively that if you could knit, you could suddenly be creative and work outside the fashion system and do your own thing. I found that people were still worrying about what colors were “in” this season. People tried to make things that looked like they came from the shops. …

Over the time of doing my research, I’ve refined my research to exploring the idea of openness. I’m trying to integrate the idea of openness into my existing practice as a fine maker of knitwear. That means opening up my practice and sharing design skills. And in practical terms, the project is about opening up existing garments. Looking at ways of using knitting skills and processes to change existing items of knitwear rather than always making new ones.

Q. You call that “tinkering,” right? I saw an image of an H&M sweater that you had magnified the label of:

A. Yes. Those pieces are more on the arty end, exploring ideas through making objects. We tend to think of manufactured items as closed. I want to see what happens if you try to open them. When I hacked into the H&M sweater, I found myself really thinking about [the fact] that it was made in Cambodia.

I’m looking at changing existing items on two levels. One is upcycling — encouraging people to be able to mend things and repair them and change them, which I think is an important thing to have a more enduring relationship with stuff. But on another level, I’m interested in the conversations it draws out and the thing about changing the thing that is given to you as closed and ready-made by the fashion industry. It does feel quite subversive.

Q. So, why knitting? What does the act of knitting hold that other forms of making clothing don’t?

A. I learned to knit when I was really little, about 5. My grandmother taught me. I’ve studied fashion and I think that I just like the way you can make the fabric and the garments at once. It’s just cool. Within a ball of yarn, you have more potential than you do within a piece of fabric. It’s even more open. Sometimes it can be overwhelming; there’s so much choice in what you do with it. You can make things in three dimensions without seams. It’s clever. I like things that are clever.

Q. I find your projects very interesting as they seem both open source and internet friendly, yet knitting has historical roots as a community activity.

A. It’s interesting thinking about knitting and craft and open source. I firmly think all of those things fit together very well. But it’s hard when there’s lots of small producers who are trying to make their living through craft. You have this kind of tension. Part of what I’m trying to do is work out how to negotiate that tension as a small business, an independent designer. I firmly am quite passionate about the openness and the open source and that kind of thing. And like you say, it has roots in the heritage of craft. It isn’t a privatized, rarefied field.

Q. Just like food, we have an overabundance of cheap and unsatisfying clothing. And, like food, there’s a growing hunger to connect more and know the sources of what we consume. How can taking a more open approach to clothing avoid the good food movement’s biggest issue — namely, being too expensive for most people?

A. Nice yarn is really expensive. It costs so much more to make something than it does to buy it. But when you’re changing an existing item of clothing that you already own and got bored with or it’s got a hole in it, the economic benefit comes right back. You could get a new-to-you item of clothing. Renew the item of clothing without all of the costs of the item. It’s thrifty and sustainable at the same time.

Q. I like your concept of sustainable and satisfying.

A. I think it’s really important. Clothes are so close to your identity and yourself. Individual well-being and satisfaction has to be part of sustainability — not just because otherwise you won’t be able to get people to change, but more fundamentally than that, if we focus on what actually makes you feel satisfied, what meets your fundamental needs, then that probably won’t be loads and loads of stuff. The two will go hand in hand.

Q. You’ve been doing this since 2003. Since then, sustainable clothing has been getting much more press and attention. Do you think sufficiency and sustainability have the ability to shake up or shift the industry in any serious way?

A. No, I don’t think the industry is shifting in any serious way. It’s no surprise because the business model, especially in the U.K., is firmly based on always selling more units, more and more stuff. And so whatever you do, within that, you’re still always working on producing more and more rubbish stuff.

Q. What would your ideal clothing industry look and function like?

A.. It would be a lot more diverse, especially in the U.K. We have a concentration of a few massive companies that retail the majority of clothing. There would be a lot more repair and support for individual people doing their own individual thing. In this country, we turn out thousands and thousands of fashion designers every year. There aren’t any jobs for them. And they tend to have to copy things — it’s how the high street [the fashion industry, in British terms] works. You copy nice designer things and turn them out. There would definitely be a role for designers in supporting amateurs to make their own stuff — so they could benefit from the skills and expertise from trained designers supporting them in making their own choices.

Maybe it’s a fairy tale, but I like the idea of there being a lot more diversity and more localized fashion culture so everywhere doesn’t look the same.

The interwebs these days are packed with sites designed to help you get rid of your old couch, offload that pile of scrap lumber from the garage, and otherwise share your stuff with everyone else on the planet. Mr. Rogers would be proud. But do we really need another “sharing” tool?

Adam Werbach thinks so. That’s why the former Sierra Club president and author of Strategy for Sustainability founded yerdle, an online sharing platform that launched in the Bay Area in November and spreads to New York City this month. He and cofounders Andy Ruben and Carl Tashian recognize that we already do an awful lot of sharing. “We just want to help speed it up,” he says. “We set out to make it as easy to share things with friends as it is to buy things.”

Yerdle follows in the footsteps of platforms like NeighborGoods and the now-defunct OhSoWe. But unlike its predecessors, it works through Facebook, connecting users to their “friends” and friends of friends. Dana Frasz, a self-described freegan and an early Bay Area yerdle user, says those fewer degrees of separation set the service apart from established giving-economy platforms like Freecycle. “You’re meeting people who know your people, but you just haven’t been connected yet,” she says.

“It seemed like every single person I met on yerdle was awesome,” Frasz continues. “Instead of just a Freecycle pickup where someone leaves [an item] on their door handle, I’d wind up talking with these people for an hour.”

Frasz had three yerdle exchanges with folks who work at Sungevity, where her partner just started a new job; her sharing with his coworkers made his social transition to a new company that much easier. Once, Frasz ended up telling a fellow yerdle user about the work she does reducing food waste. A few days later the woman called Frasz from a bakery that was about to toss four bags of bread. The two were able to meet up, save the bread from its dumpster fate, and donate it to a hunger-relief group.

This potential for real connection is key to the success of any sharing-economy platform, says Lauren Anderson, who runs Collaborative Consumption Hub, a “one-stop shop” for information about sharing economies, with Rachel Botsman — the woman who literally wrote the book on the sharing economy. “A lot of companies have failed because they haven’t been able to evangelize the community around their idea,” she says. “Even though the platform could be global, people are generally interacting on a local level. Maintaining that local sense of connection is fundamental to the strength of that community.”

Yerdle makes it extra easy to build community because no money exchanges hands. Instead, Frasz says, the service “sparks and perpetuates a gift economy.” A woman taking some martini glasses off Frasz’s hands showed up at her place with cookies. Frasz likes to bring rosemary and kale from her garden in exchange for what other people give her. “It’s not expected, but it’s just fun,” she says. “If someone’s giving you something you really like, and you have a few cookies or things from your garden to share, it makes the deal that much sweeter.”

Still, platforms like yerdle face a tricky problem of scale. On one hand, they want to maintain the sense of intimacy that will set them apart from the free section of Craigslist — once companies reach a certain scale, Anderson points out, they start attracting people “who don’t have the same values.” On the other hand, keep it too intimate, and you won’t be able to build enough critical mass to actually be useful. “If somebody comes to your platform and they can’t find what they’re looking for instantly, chances are they’re not going to come back a second time,” Anderson says.

Social, mobile, and location-based technologies make it easier to “retain the small nest within the big nest,” as Anderson puts it. Yerdle’s Facebook interface, for example, keeps exchanges confined to loose networks that already exist, increasing the chance than connections will carry on in real life.

But this gets back to the question of whether such platforms are even necessary in the first place. Why can’t we just ask our friends if they have what we need? Why do we require some special technology to facilitate what used to be a basic component of social life?

“The truth of the matter is, it’s been a good 60 or 70 years since we really traded or exchanged [in that way],” Anderson says, pointing out that breakdowns in neighborly trust began long before the internet, back when we started leaving small towns in droves and barricading ourselves behind the wheel and in front of the TV. “What technology’s done is [enabled] people to return to a manageable-size community. The isolation of the big city makes it hard to connect with like-minded people in an organic way outside your typical routine. Technology has allowed us to find people with shared interests in close proximity.”

As we’ve been exploring different aspects of the sharing economy here at Grist, I’m starting to be convinced of exactly what Anderson is saying — that web platforms for sharing represent online networks at their best. Something like yerdle isn’t designed to help us avoid social interaction, but rather to maximize, as Werbach puts it, our “enormous capacity for generosity.”

We’ve written a lot over the past month about the sharing economy — how people are using apps and technology that make it easy to share cars, bikes, homes, couches, offices, tools, pets. More sharing = less resource use = all-around goodness.

And now the latest addition to the list of shareable items: kids. Yes, people are using websites and Facebook pages to find like-minded people with whom to share children. From The New York Times:

[A] new breed of online daters [is] looking not for love but rather a partner with whom to build a decidedly non-nuclear family. And several social networks, including PollenTree.com, Coparents.com, Co-ParentMatch.com, and MyAlternativeFamily.com, as well as Modamily, have sprung up over the past few years to help them.

“While some people have chosen to be a single parent, many more people look at scheduling and the financial pressures and the lack of an emotional partner and decide that single parenting is too daunting and wouldn’t be good for them or the child,” said Darren Spedale, 38, the founder of Family by Design, a free parenting partnership site officially introduced in early January. “If you can share the support and the ups and downs with someone, it makes it a much more interesting parenting option.”

The sites present what can seem like a compelling alternative to surrogacy, adoption or simple sperm donation.

The article highlights a few brave new parenting pioneers, including Dawn Pieke, a straight woman, and Fabian Blue, a gay man, who met on a Facebook page for Co-parents.net and now share parenting responsibility for their daughter Indigo, who was born last October. “[T]hey never drafted any kind of legal agreement, which they both agree was unwise,” the Times reports, but I’m sure that’ll all sort itself out. Right?

Having a kid is by far the most carbon-intensive activity a normal person is ever likely to engage in. Think of the climate benefits if more broody singletons shared those munchkins instead of each having their own. And why just singles? Couples could get in on the fun too. And parents who already have kids and want to dump them at someone else’s house for a few days generously share them with other nurturing adults.

Good news for kids: Coming next is a site for parent-sharing. Not fully satisfied with yours? Find another couple down the street!

Seattle crunches quite a bit of granola, hugs more than its allotted trees, and has the second highest bike commute rate for U.S cities. But, as of yet, it has no bicycle sharing system — which is what all the cool, sustainable cities are doing. (I see you, Tulsa.)

Bikeshares make bicycles available to the public through a network of checkout stations, typically in densely populated areas. They can help cut down on traffic congestion, reduce pollution from cars, and act as the gateway bike for the beginners among us. Oh, and cycling makes us happy. Don’t you want to be happy, Seattle?

Yes, apparently.

In January, the nonprofit Puget Sound Bike Share announced its search for bike vendor proposals in King County, Wash., bringing Seattle one step closer to a bike sharing system. But here’s the problem: No bikeshare has ever been successful where there is a strict helmet law like Seattle’s, which requires cyclists to helmet up regardless of age. (Most municipalities only require children under a certain age to wear a helmet, or have no helmet law.)

If Seattle can pull this off, it will pave a path for cities aiming provide an easy, clean mode of transportation, even while insisting that riders protect their melons.

Helmet laws aren’t the first barricade bikeshare advocates have had to navigate. Early bike sharing programs were curbed because many of the bikes were damaged and stolen. In 2007, Tulsa solved the problem by installing a system that required users to swipe a credit card to use a bike, and tracked where the bikes were checked out and in.

Since then, sharing stations have spread across the U.S. with the ferocity of all those Walmart Supercenters we saw in the mid-’90s — except, you know, better. Already, nearly 30 U.S. cities have them and there are many more in the works. Some programs actually turn a profit.

Seattle’s calf-quaking hills and drizzly weather might make you wonder if a program like this can really take off here, but bikeshares are succeeding in similarly dreary, uneven conditions elsewhere. (See Dublin.) The helmet law, on the other hand, could create a real problem. The law by itself could whittle a whopping 30 percent off of bike share participation, according to the Puget Sound Bike Share Business Plan [PDF].

What’s the problem with helmets, you ask? One, helmets can make you look silly and make your hair look worse. Take this guy, for example.

But it’s not just fashion consciousness at work. Some experts say helmet rules make bikes seem more dangerous than they actually are. From the New York Times:

“Pushing helmets really kills cycling and bike-sharing in particular because it promotes a sense of danger that just isn’t justified — in fact, cycling has many health benefits,” says Piet de Jong, a professor in the department of applied finance and actuarial studies at Macquarie University in Sydney. He studied the issue with mathematical modeling, and concludes that the benefits may outweigh the risks by 20 to 1.

Fine odds, professor. Fine odds.

Finally, there’s the question of accessibility. We’ve pretty well figured out how to check out a bike and check it back in, but renting helmets is another can of worms.

Melbourne, Australia, notably tried the bikeshare/helmet law combo and all that resulted was mild interest and several bad cases of helmet hair. According to a 2012 study [PDF] by the Mineta Transportation Institute, the “program’s 600-bicycle fleet averages 70 trips per day, 10 percent the usage of comparable programs in London and Dublin, not accounting for differences in density and land use.”

But Seattle is not Melbourne, says Puget Sound Bike Share Executive Director Holly Houser. Melbourne was unsuccessful, Houser says, because it didn’t clearly communicate to riders that they needed to wear helmets, had a predatory ticketing policy, and didn’t offer helmets at every check-out station.

“We’re looking at having a fully integrated system where there’s a helmet at every kiosk,” Houser adds. If all goes as planned, Seattleites will be able to check out helmets the same way they rent bikes — with the swipe of a credit card. When they’re finished, they’ll turn in the helmet with the bike, so it can be cleaned and inspected. Vancouver, Canada, plans to experiment with a similar system this summer.

However, there is no proposed solution to helmet hair. Maybe they could add hair-gel vending machines too?

Houser says she’s happy to comply with the helmet law: “Everybody involved feels like it’s an important law that we don’t want to see go away.” An oft-cited 1989 study found that the likelihood of head injuries decreased by 85 percent when cyclists were wearing helmets. Houser also notes that Seattle’s topography can lead to faster speeds, and more dangerous, uncomfortable situations for first-time cyclists.

Still, Houser says the larger challenge is to protect cyclists from cars by building a better system of bike lanes, bike paths, and other infrastructure. “The point is to get more people safely on bikes,” she says.

And having more bikes on the street, studies have shown, increases safety by dint of the fact that they’re more visible, and drivers pay closer attention — even if they’re only pointing and laughing at the dudes in the funny plastic hats.

“She’s gone,” the voice on the intercom said of my would-be landlady, the woman from whom I thought I’d rented an apartment for the next month. “You’re too late.”

I stood outside the building with my suitcase, so new to Buenos Aires, Argentina, that I had no idea of where the hell I even was. Two hours earlier, I’d arrived at the flat I’d arranged via the website Airbnb, which allows people to rent out their vacant guest rooms, living rooms, and apartments, and found the place locked and gated.

I hadn’t known what to do until a man ran from the doorway of the next building, repeating my host’s name and firing questions at me in a slurry of Argentine Spanish. I was overwhelmed from 30 hours of bus travel and could only nod as he stuffed an address into my hand and packed me into a quickly-hailed cab. I arrived at this mystery location, pressed the intercom button next to the door, and got a thorough dressing-down from the unseen stranger who, fortunately or unfortunately, spoke perfect English.

It would go down as one of the highlights (or is it lowlights?) of a three-month trek across South America in which I sampled all manner of websites and resources that facilitate sharing – and learned (often the hard way) the true value of human generosity.

Over the intercom, my landlady’s assistant informed me that she was out of the country and I was shit out of luck – no matter that I had confirmed the reservation with her via email the previous evening. Then, in a gesture of something like sympathy, the disembodied voice finally emerged, dressed in all-black and pointing toward the Avenida de Mayo. “You can find hotel rooms there,” he told me, “as cheap as $60 a night.” I took his directions to an Internet cafe and booked a hostel for $12.

The hostel only had room for me that one night and I didn’t have the money for it anyway (I’d pre-paid for the Airbnb apartment, and my travels in South America were budgeted to the last dollar) so the next day I threw myself on the mercy of strangers, sending out an SOS to the Couchsurfing Buenos Aires emergency mailing list. (Couchsurfing is the freegan version of Airbnb, a network of no-cost places to crash, and for a budget traveler in a crisis like mine, it can be a godsend.) A lovely woman named Veronica offered me a couch and I spent several exhausted days on her floor, reading and writing and talking and making contingency plans.

I’d lost my Couchsurfing virginity earlier in the trip, in Chile. I had liked the look of Peter’s profile — he was an American living among the natives, and his roommates Seba and Marta seemed friendly too. When I arrived at their apartment in Valparaiso I discovered I was not the only couch-surfer there that night; riding the other couch was an actor from Northern California who’d gone to high school with one of my cousins.

The next day, Marta and I spent the entire morning sitting at the kitchen table, talking culture and politics in both English and Spanish. That night we met up with other couch-surfers in nearby Vina del Mar — a collection of Americans and Chileans and Italians and Dutch getting drunk and eating paella together. I had been sad to say goodbye, and that first positive experience made it all the easier to reach out in the urgency of my unanticipated homelessness weeks later in Argentina.

From Veronica’s couch I was finally able to connect with my Airbnb landlady, and, after her ten-day sojourn abroad, I was able to move into the apartment. The rest of my stay was fine — although when I tried to get a refund for those lost ten days, shit got real. (To the credit of Airbnb, its customer service staffers were enormously helpful and courteous as they sorted things out, and I did eventually get my money back.

If I was overly confident about Airbnb, I had been most nervous about using Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF). During my time in Chile, I’d signed up to spend a couple weeks on a ranch in the southern part of the country. I’d read about it on WWOOF and communicated briefly with Ignacio, the proprietor, but I was still apprehensive. WWOOF is marketed as a work-trade, in which travelers offer moderate amounts of labor to small farmers in exchange for room and board, and it wasn’t clear to me what, exactly, I would be doing.

The surprise was a pleasant one. My “labor” consisted almost entirely of riding horses. Sure, I picked some apples too, and one day I helped to paint a fence, but mostly I just got to ride horses — beautiful, well-trained polo ponies, in the gorgeous near-Patagonian autumn. It was the sort of vacation for which people pay thousands of dollars, and when my time in paradise finally came to an end and Ignacio dropped me off at the bus stop to head off to Buenos Aires, I half-expected him to present me with a bill for my stay. He gave me a hug instead.

Because really, when the sharing economy is working at its best, it is not powered by money — it runs on generosity. And human generosity is an enormously powerful thing.

At the very start of my adventure I sat in a cafe in Santiago, where I’d gotten to know Russel, the friendly proprietor; I was lost in thought, my backpack at my feet. The cafe was empty except for two well-dressed, middle-aged women who came in, sat down, looked at a menu, and left. I arose to leave a few moments later, only to discover that my backpack — and with it my cash, debit card, passport, phone, laptop, glasses, camera, and stand-up joke notebook — had disappeared.

I approached the register in a desperate daze. Russel grasped the gravity of the situation before I did and called the carabineros, then helped translate my police report. A few things fell through the cracks — but then, “my laptop has a sticker of a Pop-Tart dressed like an astronaut trying to go into space with a toaster” doesn’t make much sense in any language.

Russel and his partner, Carlos, offered me a place in their guest room nearby, loaned me cash to buy food, and Russel pulled a notebook and pen from his own bag so that I could start to rewrite my lost jokes. It took me 10 days to get my new passport and debit card and I spent that time in the company of my adoptive Chilean family and their countless friends — Jose and Jorge and Fernando and many more.

On Good Friday, we all trucked out to their country house for a seafood feast, setting the table to the soundtrack of “Jesus Christ, Superstar.” Gallons of wine later, I watched my hosts break out wigs and costumes and belt selections from Evita. I had found my tribe, thousands of miles from home, in a moment of panic and need. They had helped a stranger, but when the time came for me to depart, they said good-bye to a friend.

It’s a Wednesday morning like any other, and Vicky Manalansan is speeding down the freeway toward Washington, D.C., in her silver minivan. Riding in her backseat are two complete strangers she picked up at a suburban commuter lot.

Smartphone-wielding techsters in San Francisco might call this “ridesharing,” but in the D.C. area, where carpooling has been an accepted way of life for decades, they call it “slugging.” Each day, an estimated 10,000 commuters in northern Virginia hitch rides this way. Passengers get a free ride; drivers get a free pass to use the special “HOV-3” routes, open only to cars holding three passengers or more.

“With the price of gas, and this traffic here,” Manalansan says, gesturing to the jammed lanes of 395, “it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me.” During the almost two decades she’s been doing this, she says, slugging has reduced her commuting time by more than half.

Carpooling is nothing new. In the United States, it began during World War II as a money- and resource-saving device. Likewise, sharing cars with strangers predates all those ridesharing apps by decades. Northern Virginia’s dedicated HOV-3 lanes along 395 were constructed in 1969, and commuters have picked up strangers ever since.

Slugs were so named by bus drivers trying to distinguish between carpoolers and people standing in line for the bus, much as they once kept a vigilant eye out for fake bus tokens — known as “slugs.” There are also slugging systems in San Francisco, Houston, and Pittsburgh. And, internationally, Jakarta has HOV-3 lanes to help with its intense traffic, though that system is not without flaws.

But slugging was born in the nation’s capital, and it continues to thrive here. The D.C. area has the second-busiest traffic during rush hour in North America, according to a November 2010 report by NAVTEQ. To avoid the congestion, approximately 13 percent of D.C.-area commuters carpool in some fashion. The number is even higher — 18 percent — in Virginia’s Fairfax County, where slugging began.

Those HOV-3 lanes are key. Slugging doesn’t work with HOV-2 lanes, open to cars with just two people, that allow drivers to merge with other traffic. First, riders and drivers alike feel safer with three people in the car instead of two, so people are more likely to carpool with the HOV-3 system. Second, having clear entry and exit points to the HOV-3 lanes helps the police enforce the three-person requirement and prevents other drivers from cutting in and out of the HOV lane; barring an accident, the lane always makes for a much faster trip into the city. The HOV-3 system also helps establish a handful of popular pick-up and drop-off points along the route.

Having a transit system in place is crucial to slugging’s success — if no drivers show up, riders need to have an alternative, like taking the bus. That’s why slug lines often form around bus stops.

There are some small rules of etiquette for slugs: Don’t yak on your cell phone, don’t ask the driver to change the radio station, don’t try to chat with the driver the whole time — in general, don’t bug the driver. But for the most part, slugging is easy to pick up.

And it seems to work. In nearly two decades, Manalansan has never had a negative experience. “I see them all the time,” she says. “I don’t know their names, but I see their faces.” She gets to know the slugs who stand in the same line day after day, and they are professional and polite without fail. These are, after all, her neighbors.

In fact, picking up slugs has been a boon for Manalansan’s business — she runs a flower shop in D.C. “It started with one person, 18 years ago,” she says. “She introduced me to everyone in the office at the World Bank.” Now Manalansan does brisk business with the bank, and she keeps business cards in the ashtray of her minivan. “You never know the referrals,” she says.

Such positive stories abound in sluglore: Carolina Marin found her son’s nanny through a regular slug. Another slug found her mechanic through a driver.

In fact, there has been only one reported incident with slugging. Gene C. McKinney, once the sergeant major of the U.S. Army, picked up slugs near his home in Manassas, Va., in October 2010. The passengers asked to be let off near Pentagon City after McKinney drove fast and erratically. When one of the slugs tried to snap a photograph of the driver’s license plate, McKinney hit the gas and the man. The former top soldier served a short jail sentence after he pleaded guilty to attempted malicious wounding.

Virginia law bans people from soliciting rides from the side of roads, but when it comes to slugging, the state looks the other way. Joan Morris, spokesperson for the Virginia Department of Transportation, says that slugging was “created by commuters for commuters.” “It’s been very successful,” she says, “and we stay out of it.” VDOT can’t actively encourage people to ride with strangers because of liability issues, Morris says, but officials take slug lines into account when they are building commuter lots.

The practice has been such a success that transportation officials have expressed interest in bringing it to cities in Colorado, Washington, Maryland, New York, and Illinois, says David LeBlanc, a retired Army officer who founded the only website devoted to slugging, Slug-Lines.com, and wrote the book Slugging: The Commuting Alternative for Washington DC. There is also talk of adding HOV-3 lanes along the I-95 corridor, which would encourage ridesharing.

“Initially, it was a kind of adversarial relationship between slugging and any transportation office or official,” LeBlanc says. “Now it’s a much better working relationship. People are wondering, ‘Hey, what can we do to make this better for all of us?’”

Frank Lakwijk, a senior economist at the International Monetary Fund, has been picking up slugs in Springfield, Va., for 10 years. He’s surprised by how few of his coworkers know about or understand slugging. “They think it’s hitchhiking. But I would never do that,” he says emphatically. “This is organized, polite; it doesn’t feel risky at all. People don’t pay attention to gender. It just works.”

No app required.