The first email announcing the founding of The Freecycle Network was sent on May First, 2003. Happy Fifth Anniversary to us! As it would happen, we also just broke the 5 million member mark globally!  WOW! We've certainly come a long way from that first email which went out to about 30 friends and a handful of nonprofits. I was offering a bed. Salvation Army doesn't take beds as they worry about fleas and none of my friends needed it, so what a great reason to start a gifting network. When we quickly grew to over 800 members, I thought it could never work at that huge size!! How wonderfully wrong I was!

Anyway, my thanks go out to the 10,000 volunteers globally and the now over 5 million members in 85 countries.

Warm regards for our shared successes and phenomenal growth these past years. What a fun ride. If people weren't basically good and giving, Freecycle wouldn't work. But, indeed, it does work, in a wild and beautiful way...

Keep on keepin' on!

Deron