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These Guidelines are not suggestions. They are the rules, principles, and expectations to which you MUST agree if you use Kindista to share resources. Please refer to the Terms of Use for more information regarding these Guidelines and your responsibilities in using Kindista.
Request anything that might improve your quality of life or that you would otherwise have to pay money for. Offer anything you think might be useful or appreciated by someone else. Offers and requests can include food, clothing, tools, materials, tutoring or instruction, skills, support, housing, work space, or art. You can even offer the temporary use of tools, equipment, or living or work space. Get creative. We encourage you to post anything you have that is underutilized, or of which you have excess.
No. We encourage you to be discerning in deciding when you will give an offer or fulfill a request. When giving is pure, it feels good to both the recipient and the giver. There is no right or wrong answer on this. Each of us has slightly different criteria we may use when making this decision. Here are some things you may want to consider when deciding whether to respond to a request:
All that we ask is that you make every reasonable effort to follow through with your offer once you agree to give to someone.
To limit who can see your offers and requests, you must first join one or more groups. After your membership to a group has been approved by one of the group's administrators, you will be able to limit who can see an offer or request. To do so, edit the offer or request and select from your available groups under "Who can see this offer/request?".
Yes! We're building a culture where we want to share with each other because we actually care about each other, not just because we receive pieces of paper with numbers on them in return. Even if you are blessed with financial abundance, we hope you will still try to get as many of your needs met through gift as possible. If you find that you are able to get some of your needs met through gift, we hope that you will share your financial abundance with others so that they can pay for needs that are hard to meet directly through sharing, such as utilities, car insurance, and phone bills.
Kindista is specifically designed to encourage a culture of sharing in which we are all able to give freely without having to worry about how we are going to get our needs met in return. In that spirit, it is a violation of the Terms of Use to post an offer that requires the recipient to give you goods or services in return. Similarly, it is a violation to post a request in which you offer to barter goods or services in return. However, it is perfectly acceptable to charge the recipient pass-through costs (materials, fuel, etc.) or require them to provide materials that will be used in creating a gift (such as yarn for knitted clothing or wood and nails for a deck).
Most gifts are not taxable in the United States. Please refer to the IRS guidelines regarding gift taxes here and here. If you are still unsure about whether your gift is taxable you may want to consult a tax attorney.
First post the text for your item. After you post it, there will be a link to add pictures.
Kindista offers a variety of ways to determine whether other people on the site are trustworthy. When looking at someone's profile, you can see if you have any mutual connections. If you see anyone on their mutual connections list whom you feel that you can trust, you can contact the connection for a referral. If you don't see any dependable mutual connections, take a look at their reputation.
We encourage you to expand your comfort zone for generosity. But at the same time, we want you to feel safe. Always check in with your gut and your heart when considering meeting up with someone you don't already know in the real world.
Contacts are like people you follow on Twitter or Google+. When you add someone to your contacts, their public activity (offers, requests, events, and announcements) will show up in your activity feed, and they will get a notification that you have added them. If they choose to add you back, they will show up in mutual connections on your profile page and you will be able to see any content that they are sharing exclusively with their contacts. Adding someone as a contact also makes it easier to send them messages and find them in the search bar. You can see all of your contacts here.
Mutual connections are contacts of yours who have also listed the person whose profile you are looking at as one of their own contacts as well. Mutual connections can help you determine if you might want to share with someone. If you have any uncertainty about interacting with someone on Kindista please contact a mutual connection first and ask them if they think the person in question would be trustworthy for your particular situation.
Note: when you see one of your contacts listed as a mutual connection, that does not necessarily mean that the person whose profile you are looking at has also added the person to their own contacts list.
Kindista membership is primarily by invitation. This means that it is up to you to help our network grow. We encourage you to send invitations wisely, inviting people you trust who will actively share their resources with, and ask for support from, the Kindista community.
Our invitation system creates a trail of accountability and helps us prevent spam and abuse as we grow. This system allows us to remove invitation privileges from people who abuse our community or who invite abusers to join.
By default we will add your invitees to your contacts list (and you to their list) when they join. You can add or remove someone from your contacts at any time by visiting their profile page.
Please contact us immediately if you have been mistreated by another Kindista member or if you have a verifiable reason to believe that a Kindista member poses a threat to your safety, your property, or the safety or property of other Kindista members.
Please do not contact us for simple disagreements or misunderstandings with other members. In any case please do not air your grievances by misusing Kindista's functionality (such as misusing the "Gratitude" functionality as a method to publicly post your concerns). Such misuse of Kindista's functionality is a violation of Kindista's Terms of Use and will not be tolerated.
We take your concerns very seriously and we handle them on a case-by-case basis. However we make no guarantees about what actions (if any) we might take in your specific circumstances. Please remember that Kindista has no liability whatsoever for your interactions with other Kindista members (for more about this please refer to our Terms of Use). Please use good judgement when choosing who to give to or receive from.
Groups are Kindista accounts for local organizations. You can create a group profile for any business, non-profit, faith community, or organization in which you have a leadership or administrative role. We want to prevent confusion to other Kindista users by preventing the creation of duplicate group accouts. Please make sure that someone hasn't already created a group profile for your group, before creating a new group account.
It is up to a group's administrator(s) to determine how members can join a group. If the administrators have allowed people to request membership, there will be a button on the group's profile page that says "Join group". If that button is not on the group's profile page, membership for the group is by invitation only.
For technical reasons, groups are not able to have multiple locations at this time. However, if your group has multiple locations, you are permitted to create separate group profiles for each location.
Posting gratitude is a way of showing your appreciation for other people on Kindista. This appreciation helps people feel more excited about sharing and helps us build a culture of generosity. Expressing gratitude also let other people know that the person you have written about is contributing to the network. This helps us build trust in the knowledge that eventually our generosity will come back to us; that we're not supporting a culture of free-loading.
We encourage you to express gratitude for anyone that has shared something meaningful with you, even if it's small. You can also thank multiple people in the same statement of gratitude when you receive benefit from their collective efforts at the same time.
You can edit or amend your statements of gratitude about other people about other people any time. This way, if someone shares additional resources with you in the future you can edit what you have written and your edited statement will re-appear near the top of the activity feed for your community to see.
Yes! We encourage you to express gratitude about anyone who you have witnessed making significant contributions to your community as a whole, or to the world at large, even if you personally didn't benefit. Many important contributions don't have any primary recipients.
Examples include:
All that we ask is that you limit your expressions of gratitude, to information of which you have first-hand knowledge, or are otherwise certain of its accuracy. In addition to violating the terms of use, posting inaccurate information in a statement of gratitude can reflect poorly on your own Kindista reputation, and may cause people to lose trust in you.
A public reputation of generosity can act as a currency, similar to money, in that it facilitates more frequent exchanges of resources. When we share our gratitude publicly it helps us build a larger culture of generosity and appreciation.
Our goal is to enable active members of the sharing economy to get a substantial portion of their needs met through resource sharing. In order for that to happen we need to bring lots and lots of new people into the network. Many of these new folks will only start to participate if they see that other people are already getting lots of their needs met through the system. That's why it's up to us to be as publicly generous and appreciative as possible right now.
Please email support@kindista.org from the primary email address associated with each Kindista account (check the settings page to verify which email is the primary email address). In each email that you send, make sure to reference the userid and email address associated with both accounts to be merged (look at the url for your Kindista profile page to see your userid).
Link your Kindista account to your Facebook account from the Kindista settings page. After linking your accounts, you will see an option to to publish items to Facebook when you post them on Kindista.
You will have the option to tag someone in a Statement of Gratitude on Facebook if all of the following are true:
Events posted to Kindista must adhere to our Terms of Use. Kindista is for non-profit sharing, therefore you may not post an event to Kindista for which you plan on charging an entrance fee.
You are free to conduct fundraising activities at events posted to Kindista. However, donating to your cause must not be a requirement for participants to attend your event. If you post an event to Kindista, you may not turn away anyone due to a lack of funds.