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Citizen Infrastructure

Community Supplies: a sharing app that spread to 200 neighborhoods

It started at a kid’s birthday party. Josh Nesbit’s friend MJ had bought a pile of party supplies and didn’t want them to just sit in his garage — “they should be shared with people here instead.” That night, the two built the first version of a neighbourhood sharing app. The response was immediate: “Holy [shoot], you built it?” — followed at once by “what if it did this?”

The instinct it answered is a familiar one: “I do not want my neighbour going to Home Depot to buy the tool I have in my garage.” Big platforms had never really solved it; a small, local, co-built tool could.

From one block to 200 neighbourhoods

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The app — Community Supplies (free and open-source) — lets neighbours photograph what they’re willing to lend, set simple lending guidelines, and borrow from each other. When MJ’s experience was written up in a Washington Post column (“I wanted to buy less stuff. I ended up bonding with my neighbors,” 2026), the makers turned the app multi-tenant the morning it ran — so that anyone could start their own. Over the next three days, about 200 neighbourhoods launched their own sharing communities.

Why it’s a story worth knowing

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Community Supplies is the clearest example of locality-to-locality spreading: not one platform scaling to millions, but a small tool remixed by community after community. As Josh found, the technology was almost a “Trojan horse” — neighbours told him it had simply given them permission to ask one another, “are we okay sharing things with each other?” That permission, more than the app, is the relational tech. It was built through the Relational Technology Project.

Sources

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