"I'm hoping to get more home-setting supplies, like for canning, or a massage table — things you don't necessarily think of as tools, but that people might buy and only use once or twice in a year," Llewellyn said."It's not necessary for everybody to own some of these things, and their purchase drives the consumption and waste cycle that most of us are stuck in," he said.
'Crowd resourcing'Tool libraries have been slowly spreading across the country since 1976, with at least 45 active libraries and about 10 more, in addition to Asheville's, preparing to launch in the coming months, Letts said.
The Asheville Tool Library is set to open in late February in a space adjacent to and owned by the French Broad Food Co-op on Biltmore Avenue and would initially be open on Wednesdays and Saturdays during the hours of the co-op's tailgate markets.An online fundraiser with a $10,000 goal was launched Sept. 9 through ioby — the national nonprofit whose always-lower-case initials stand for "in our back yard" — the antithesis of the traditional NIMBY "not in my back yard" philosophy.
The web-based, "crowd-resourcing" platform supports community-led, neighbor-funded projects by allowing organizers to collect tax-deductible donations and recruit local volunteers.Since ioby rhymes with Nairobi was created in 2010 by three graduate students from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, $518,000 in donations has been generated for local projects, including 218 that have been completed. About 86 percent of the projects are in cities and towns east of the Mississippi. The average donation is $35.