‘Louisburgh Free Market’, our WhatsApp group to rehome items for free, started the Monday 21st of March 2022. Within one week, ‘Louisburgh Free Market’ had 95 members. This was achieved just by distributing the link to joining the group through existent WhatsApp outlets (such as CALL’s growing group, or one of the local playschool groups). Members of our community were key at that moment, and sharing the initiative within well established, trusted local groups really helped starting off.

At the beginning sharing was slow: during the first week the group only rehomed 25 items*. After one month numbers of members did not increase that much (we had 102 members), but people started getting into the dynamic (second hand is OK!) and that week 51 items got rehomed.

We keep monitoring the number of members and items rehomed, now annually. Within a year we had 210 members and that week we rehomed 71 items. Now (as May 2023), the group has 265 members.

Using these numbers we can extrapolate and have an idea of how many items have been rehomed thanks to the group.

• First month (March 2022)=100 items (sampled 25 items per week in week 1, multiplied by 4 weeks)
• Next 11 months (April 2022-March 2023)= 2448 (sampled 51 items per week in week 1 of month 2, multiplied by 48 weeks)
• April 2023= 284 (sampled 71 items per week sampled in week 1 of year 2, multiplied by 4 weeks)

This implies that to this date (May 2023), Louisburgh Free Market has attempted to shared an impressive amount of 2,832 items. Now, not all items get rehomed. Many times items are offered and nobody takes them, or people requests items and their request is not fulfilled. Therefore to estimate the number of items rehomed by the group we divided that number by half, and assume that about 50% of items offered or requested are fulfilled, which is a very conservative estimate.

So, after all that math, our current estimate of items rehomed by May 2023 is 1,416. Good going!

* When calculating rehoming, multiple items that are the same (e.g. if someone is giving away four chairs) count as one.

(Last updated: May 2023)