Give and Take: WHY HELPING OTHERS DRIVES OUR SUCCESS

write for Wikipedia, hardly any volunteers reported being involved for self-serving reasons, such as
to make new contacts, build their reputations, reduce loneliness, or feel valued and needed. But the
relatively altruistic value of helping others wasn’t the sole factor they emphasized either. Wikipedia
contributors aren’t necessarily givers across the different domains of their lives, but they’re
volunteering their time to exhaustively summarize and cross-reference Wikipedia entries. Why? In a
survey, two reasons dominated all others: they thought it was fun and they believed information
should be free. For many volunteers, writing Wikipedia entries is otherish: it provides personal
enjoyment and benefits others.
Beal believes the otherish structure of Freecycle is one of the major reasons that it grew so fast.
Giving away items that we don’t need, and benefiting others in the process, is the gift economy
equivalent of Adam Rifkin’s five-minute favors: low cost to oneself coupled with potentially high
benefit to others. It’s noteworthy that Freecycle’s formal mission statement highlights two sets of
benefits: members can contribute to others and gain for themselves. The mission is to “build a
worldwide gifting movement that reduces waste, saves precious resources & eases the burden on our
landfills while enabling our members to benefit from the strength of a larger community.”
Beyond this otherish structure, there’s a central feature of a Freecycle community that motivates
people to start giving. A clue to the mechanism lies in the story of a French consultant who struggled
for years to earn the trust of a potential client—until he recognized the power of a sense of
community.