My Interveiw with Robin

This was at the money free valentines market in Vancouver.

Rhiannon: what's your name?

Robin: my name is Robin.

Rhiannon:did you start with stuff here or did people just bring stuff for a while?

Robin: um, we started by... a few of us that were planning the market brought our old stuff, and by now it's the fourth one so people are starting to bring stuff. People off the streets are also starting to bring a bag full of stuff, so yeah.

Rhiannon:how did you get the idea?

Robin:um, well, I work with a group called Food Not Bombs, and that's a group that gives free meals to people. We find food that would otherwise be thrown away and we give it out for free. And so Food Not Bombs does these things called the Really Really Free Market so we just thought why don't we do one in Vancouver I think I’ve never been to one before. 

Rhiannon: well we've been to Food Not Bombs 3 times before actually.

Robin: oh really? Cool! Well yeah, the idea came from Food Not Bombs.

Rhiannon:is there any way I can help with this market?

Robin:well yeah, definitely. You can do anything. What do you want to do? Do you have a skill?

Rhiannon: um, I don't know.

Robin: well you could... you could, uhhh... Well, you could definitely help by taking things with you, when you go. You could help by spreading the word, and telling other people about it. You could help by organizing the clothes in a nice way, you know, or just like do a little dance, sing a little song, it's kind of open to whatever you want to do.

Rhiannon:ok, uuuuummm, do you know of other money free markets and which?. 

Robin: well I know of one in London, Ontario. I found it on the internet. And I know sometimes things like clothing swaps happen, where people all bring their old clothes, and then everyone gets to try on clothes like crazy, ummm.... yeah... but I mean not too much! Not too much. That's why we wanted to try doing one here.

Rhiannon: Oh.

Robin: Do you know of any other ones?

Rhiannon: The only other one I know of is Food Not Bombs.

Robin: Cool. Yeah.

Rhiannon: And the one I'm going to make.

Robin: Yeah! That's so awesome! I'm excited. I want to come!

Rhiannon: do you have to bring something or do you just... can you just come or just give?

Robin: Either. Whatever you want. If you come with nothing and leave with a whole bunch of stuff, that's perfect. Or if you want to bring all of your stuff... I mean, the only difficult thing is [that] everything gets transported by car, so if people bring, like couches and beds and that kind of thing it's a little bit hard to deal with, so, yeah... but you can just come empty handed and leave...

Rhiannon: So, since every store is not like this yet, how do you get money without having any... thing...?

Robin: Hmmm... the cool thing about this is that we don't really need money yet. The only thing that we need money for is like, gas, like when we have to drive things back and forth? But I think, eventually... you can apply for grants from the government or from different... like the art councils can give you money, if you apply...

Rhiannon: Yeah.

Robin: So that's one way, or you could have bake-sales. You could do a free market one week and then a bake-sale the next week. Yeah. You could make a little bit of money from bake-sales.

Rhiannon: And that... is all my questions.

Robin: Cool! Thank you. So are you going to stick around for a little bit?

Rhiannon: yeah.