Alex Green - Edinburgh Tool Library
By Fiona Breucker
Alex Green is a volunteer at the Edinburgh Tool Library, a tool-lending organisation that combines positive environmental impact with community building. You can find out more about the tool library in our sustainability initiatives section.
Fiona: How did you become involved with the tool library, what do you like about its concept and what do you consider its impact in terms of sustainability, community, and economy?
Alex: I've been a volunteer at the tool library for a little over a year now and it's been a more rewarding time than I ever could have imagined. Just before joining the tool library I had started a new office job and had a few major changes in my living situation so I was feeling somewhat adrift socially and I was missing that tangible sense of achievement that you get from seeing the physical results of your work. Don't get me wrong, I love my job but there is a world of difference between seeing new rows in a spreadsheet and seeing a new woodworking project taking shape in front of you! Seeing the pictures on social media, I could tell that this was a fantastic community that was pushing its members to greater heights whilst always having its feet grounded firmly in the local community. That's really the personal side of what attracted me to the tool library. What's kept me there is the principles and practices of the other volunteers. I have been pushed to reduce my purchases of single-use items, to support small businesses, whether local or online, and to take pride in raising up the community around us.
Whilst I've benefited individually from my work with the tool library, its impact, and that of the wider sharing community, is simply vast. In terms of the direct impact, we are allowing many people to access woefully underutilised and often forgotten tools or materials. It's not as simple as saying every tool we loan is a tool that doesn't need to be created new, but it's not far off. There are plenty of donations that we receive where people have used a tool for a single project and then found it years later in a cupboard. I don't believe that people view electric drills or saws as single-use purchases but that is often what they become in the typical residential household.
Alongside this environmental benefit, we are also increasing inclusiveness and accessibility for sections of the population that often lack either the economic means or the knowledgebase to take home improvement of other projects into their own hands. I am far from a DIY-guru but some of my colleagues are incredibly knowledgeable and practiced, allowing them to dispense woodworking wisdom and similar gems alongside the tools themselves. The patience that they show in identifying the user's level of knowledge and their needs to give them the best tool for the job is pretty remarkable and I always love the moment when a member returns with pictures of their finished project, proud of what they've achieved. I could probably talk about this for hours so I'll leave it at that and let us move on to another question.
Fiona: What do you think are the main advantages and challenges of organisations that are part of the sharing economy such as the tool library?
Alex: The sharing economy is quite a broad concept (when I was reading up on the economic impacts many of the papers were focussing on AirBnB, which we share few similarities with) so it is good to focus down on organisations with the same basic features as the tool library; community-centred, membership-based, and volunteer-driven.
Being community-centred, in terms of members, leadership, and operations, gives organisations an excellent level of insight into what they need to be providing. It is relatively easy to gauge what is and isn't working for your members because they will tell you. Furthermore, it allows organisations to adapt rapidly to their core users such as in extreme weather conditions, major social events, or during a health crisis. The community-centred organisation knows who its users are, what their needs are, and what specific restrictions are in place that will affect their running. More broadly reaching and less focussed organisations may have a harder time in identifying how they need to change their practices to meet the needs of a user-base that is affected in many different ways. Obviously, there is a challenge here in that we are putting all our eggs in one basket, or at least one community. As we've seen through the COVID-19 pandemic, if your specific community is locked down then so is your organisation.
Being membership-based, in addition to being community-centred, creates more of a sense of ownership amongst your users and will typically promote them supporting and often driving service improvements. If you buy something once and it doesn't serve you correctly then you don't go back there, but if you have paid for long-term access to a service then you have an active interest in getting the most from it across that period. I suppose the challenge here is living up to the members' standards and matching the expectations set by the numerous other subscription services most people now have!
I won't comment too much on the economic aspect of being membership-based, simply because that's not an area of the tool library that I am involved in, but a quick bit of reading will point to membership-based services having a slightly less volatile financial situation - not that it's ever easy in the nonprofit space.
Being volunteer-driven perhaps comes with more immediate challenges than advantages, the most immediate for myself being the inability to commit as much time as I would like to ongoing projects and having to put the world of paid employment first. A voluntary organisation needs to strike a balance between setting expectations for volunteers to sign up for a certain number of hours per week or month and also not seeking to dominate the lives of people who give their time and expertise for free. The other side of this coin then is the passion with which your volunteers work. If I am turning up somewhere to work for no financial reward then I am doing it solely because I believe it is the right thing to do and I want to feel proud of a job well done at the end of the day. That's not to say there aren't plenty that get the same feeling from their paid job but I struggle to think of jobs where I've happily headed off on a Saturday morning to stand in the Leith rain and greet customers, but the tool library gets that from me.
To round off this question then, I'll just state that the one major challenge I find that comes from the combination of these three factors: availability. In the age of Amazon Prime and 24hr supermarkets, it can be a tough sell to ask people for money in exchange for being able to pick up tools twice a week rather than at the very moment they need them. For sharing organisations such as the tool library, thank you for your patience. We do try to make it worth it, whether in saving you money or saving the planet.
Fiona: Sustainability is often described to aim to include social, economic and environmental factors. Do you think it is feasible to upscale projects like the tool library to steer towards a more sustainable society?
Alex: I'll be direct here about what sort of upscaling I would see as both possible and beneficial, and what upscaling for the sharing economy should not be. Simply, I do not think that the tool library as a concept should be upscaled so that there are vast and faceless Tool Library Inc. warehouses across the different regions of the country.
Alongside upscaling, one has to consider centralisation and what that means for the sharing economy. I would like to see more salaried employment opportunities in tool libraries for example, and centralisation may well support that. Centralising may also allow the organisation as a whole to provide more niche or specific tools for very particular projects. I believe, however, that mass centralising of organisations such as the tool library will inevitably remove the community-centred factor that I discussed earlier and that is one of the strengths of the sharing community that we cannot afford to lose. If we want to change society to be more socially, economically, and environmentally just then we need to be working at the hearts of individual communities.
Where upscaling would work for the sharing economy would be in building partnerships between communities. It may seem like a trivial difference but I think that instead of an anonymous nationwide organisation that controls a specific sphere of the sharing economy, we can build coalitions of mutual support among organisations that seek to perform the same function but for different communities. If we have a surplus of basic tools, we look to help others setting up tool libraries in other towns or cities. They maintain their own leadership, their own membership, and their own community - focussed priorities, but we can still help each other - whether that's by sharing materials or knowledge.
There are definitely areas where we need to be innovative about upscaling and some centralisation is beneficial. I would like to see sharing organisations form collective bargaining blocs to negotiate for improved technological or governmental support. An example of one such model, although in a different field, the many student unions in the UK are members of the National Union of Students who negotiate prices for all manner of retail and catering products as a single consortium. That is buying power that an individual union could not manage alone, but as a block they achieve that while maintaining their own identities. I would suggest similar pathways for the sharing economy may bear fruit.
Fiona: Do you perceive the current crisis as more of a threat or an opportunity for both the tool library and sustainability in general?
Alex: There is no avoiding the difficulty that this crisis has thrown up for the tool library and organisations that share a similar mission. Some companies that specialise in volume over sustainability have capitalised on this moment where many people may feel safer buying from a distant seller and we need to learn how to respond to that. We have recently reopened our services, with lots of new strict procedures in place, and we are doing our best to serve the community safely.
Where we have found opportunity is in finding other ways to support the community. We have volunteers working on our sewing machines to produce reusable face masks and are helping to coordinate a wider effort to collect and distribute them. We have had time to repair tools, update processes, and conduct other back-office tasks. The volunteers may have to wear facemasks and be more careful about opening to the public but the desire to make a difference has not been dampened. The crisis is challenging but I don't think it will destroy organisations committed to sustainable living and communities.
Quickly to note too, whilst the tool library has been changing how it operates, millions of people have been learning that they don't need long commutes or shopping trips and that they can shop more carefully and conscientiously. We have seen drops in emissions and numerous other environmental markers. Regardless of what the crisis means for one organisation, it has firmly proven that as a society we can make huge changes and continue living. This is a key opportunity to build a sustainable future and help people see that if they can do it for COVID-19 then they can do it for climate change.
Fiona: What is your wish for the future?
Alex: This is possibly the most challenging question here because it's so broad.
My wish for the future is that we can build communities that are simultaneously self-sufficient and cooperative. A sustainable future to me is one where, at every level of society, people want to strive forwards but still know that they can ask for help and willingly offer it to others. For me, the tool library is a small part of the sharing movement, which itself is a small part of a much larger movement to recognise that everyone has the right to live and to enjoy life. People deserve to have shelter, food, clean water, and healthcare. They also deserve the opportunity to learn and improve, to better themselves and to be supported to do that. They deserve the opportunity to follow their passions and chase enriching projects.
If anyone is struggling to find enriching projects, have a look at your local sharing initiatives. Even if you don't currently feel that interest burning in you, the passion of others spreads like wildfire.
Thanks a lot for this wonderful interview and all the interesting insights, Alex!