A lot of great ideas in the world are simply never thought of, until they are. We are part of some groups and some practices which feel quite positive and so i thought it would be fun to share some of them in the hopes that you might discover a new thing or two and have your lives transformed as much as ours have been… feel free to let some of our ideas spark some different-but-related ideas of your own…

Without much more ado about nothing, here are ten life hacks, ideas of groups that might make your community life a little bit better:

[1] Meal Club

For the last few weeks Valerie Duffield Anderson and i have partnered with Helene Visagie and Ashley Visagie in a meal-sharing venture. Each week, typically on a Monday, each couple produces a meal that is enough for eight people and then delivers half of it to the other couple.

One time of cooking equals four meals [two dinners, two lunches typically for us].

Not only does it save us some time and effort but it opens up a whole range of new meal opportunities – Helene’s chicken pie this week was mouth-watering as was the tomato bredie the previous week [the name didn’t sell me cos not the biggest tomato fan but the meal itself was so very delish!] – and builds on already established relationships.

Who else is going to give it a try? Tag the person/couple you would like to join with and see if they’re keen – an easy tip is to do it for a month and see how it goes – or do a six month experiment and see how that goes…

[2] Games Club

We love Board Games but they are quite expensive and so it becomes hard to justify increasing your collection. So we have done a similar vibe to meal club with the same friends actually – Ashley and Helene – and joined together in buying an expensive game together that can live at either of our houses. Great Western Trail is a brilliant three hour monster of a game that normally costs around R1400 and we managed to find it at a ‘damaged board games sale’ [You can barely make out the crinkle on the bottom side of the box -this was a great deal] and so with a massive discount i think each of us ended up paying aboout R250 for a game we all have access to. But even R700 would have been worth it for a game that has already gotten major game play and brought us [and others] hours of entertainment.

[3] Vacuum Club

Okay, this one is a little more admin and i know tbV would love it if we had our own vacuum, but while we don’t we have been sharing with her dad – we have someone who cleans our house on a Wednesday and he has someone who comes on a Saturday. Sometime, in between those two days, we drive the vacuum from one house to the other. Two households, one vacuum. And because we live very close to each other it is really an easy one. This can work with lawnmowers and power tools and even ladders and things like that. Find a family who live nearby and see what gadgets and equipment you can share costs on.

[4] Common Change

i’ve shared about this one a lot and if you haven’t signed up to start a Common Change group with some people you love and trust yet, or at the very least inquired about how to host a Generosity Dinner as a once-off event [with the potential of creating interest in a Common Change group] then you really need to give this one some thought.

Start a group with some friends of yours and decide whether you are going to give a monthly amount [say R100 or R500] or a percentage of your income [1% or 10%] to the group fund. Once you have some money then people in the group are invited to share needs of people they know [always one degree of separation] and see if the group can meet them [with the money but also with knowledge and networks and other creative ideas] Before long, like us, you may have given R62 000 to a number of different needs, all representing people we care about and want to see thrive.

[5] Car Club

This one might feel a little more out there for some of you, but especially for those of you who have more than one vehicle and know people who have none or maybe struggle to always make all the pieces fit together nicely with one.

We have been blown away on so many occasions [often by KT and Sean Pattenden, but at the moment by Sue Gray and also by Matt and Corina Ash and others i’m sure i am forgetting] by people who have lent us a vehicle for a day or a week when our timetables have been a little bit too crazy to back up the one car household we have tried to be. This has helped us to try and get creative with our car as well when it comes to a friend who doesn’t have one.

But if you can work it so that there is one day a week or a month even where you can get by without your car[s] and know someone who never has access but can drive and who you trust with your vehicle, then it’s another relatively easy way to make the world a better and easier place for someone else. An alternative would be if you have the time to drive someone somewhere and offer yourself as a personal chauffeur for a couple of hours a week, perhaps for a weekly grocery shop or taking a kid to a sports practice.

Car-pooling is another way of doing this which i don’t think South Africans are particularly good at. But if you live near someone who works near you, take turns taking your car into work and giving someone a ride or getting one, rather than having two cars dd to the congestion every single day.

[6] Meat Reducation Days, Weeks or Months

When we returned from living in America for three years [around 2015, i believe] tbV and i started trying to reduce the meat we eat because of stories of how meat production is not doing good things for the planet. We started trying out a no-meat week every second week and with some exceptions have largely done that for close to four years now [which means essentially two years of not eating meat at all  which starts to add up].

If you are a heavy meat-eater and can’t imagine life without it, then perhaps you can see fit to at least having one day a week – a designated day is easier cos it’s generally easier to keep track of, so every Monday for example – where you don’t eat any meat.

If you are feeling a little more committed to the task then join us in removing meat from your menu every second week and literally halve your meat consumption on the spot. We don’t get legalistic about it and so if we go somewhere on a non-meat week and are offered meat we will eat it and generally our meat weeks are not meat heavy but continue to look like they did beforehand which is meat two to four times a week i guess.

If you want to go next level you could do one month on, one month off and be reducing meat even more.

What this does is increase your fruit and vegetable intake generally and also often introduce you to a whole new world [a new fantastic point of view, some might say, er, um, sing] where you get creative and start exploring new veg options and new types of things to eat that are not meat. We don’t generally look at our meat-free weeks as lesser weeks even though we both love meat. But we also love butternut and potatoes [in all their forms] and a host of other amazing things we have discovered.

[7] Good Food Club

Another beautiful thing we are part of is called the Good Food Club and there are a bunch of them scattered around Cape Town. Friends of ours have sourced a number of food products from meat to fish to dairy to chocolate to vegetables to cleaning products from local farms and individuals and we go online once a month and make an order and then all the stuff gets delivered to one person’s house and we go and pick it up – the process is a little more labour intensive than going to the supermarket and some of the products are more expensive than we might find elsewhere, but they all come from places that have been visited by the Good Food Club reps and we are buying a large amount of our monthly groceries from local farms which is amazing.

i’m not sure what kind of capacity these clubs have for new members but i imagine if you want to join one just let me know and i can try and connect you to the one that is closest to you.

[8] Recipe Share

One thing Val does from time to time is plan a week’s worth of meals in advance and then share her meal plan, recipes and shopping list online. A surprisingly large amount of people seem to get super stoked about this every time she does it. i guess for many people it takes away the time it often takes to come up with a plan for the week and it also gives some fresh ideas for people of new things to try and make.

For those of you who have a favourite recipe for a thing this can be as easy as sharing it as a status on Facebook and then inviting your friends to share their one favourite recipe in the comments below – instant recipe book for people following the thread. i have a go to Fudge recipe which i got from my friend Debbie Knighton-fitt and now i have a friend or two who have made that theirs as well.

Sharing really is caring and in the food world it is the easiest thing to do.

[9] Remember the bags

One thing i have gotten a LOT better at this year is taking our bags into Pick n Pay when i shop [which is maybe half the time] so that i don’t need to get new single use plastic bags [which are such a huge blight on our planet!] – in fact on occasions when i forget them in the car i tend to juggle carry the shopping rather than get new bags – i also ALWAYS ask them not to bother with the extra single use milk and dairy and toothpaste etc etc flimsy bags they insist on adding to your shopping. On my last few visits i have stepped it up another level and now remember to take in our string bags for when i am buying fruit or veg so that we don’t need more of those flimsy single use bags.

This is such an easy one to do and can make such a huge difference when we all start doing it.

We tend to use the plastic bags from our shopping as a bin in the kitchen and it was actually a great day when we ran out of them. A little bit inconvenient but the sign that we were moving away from the bag stockpiling. And something amazing which Val has done once before and just started doing recently again is some origami magic using the local newspapers we get in crazy abundance and never read and would stop if we knew how and turning them into square waste receptacles and so we don’t need bags any more but we have paper bags which grab our trash and which we throw into out big garbage wheelie bin. So easy to do and doesn’t take her too long – she will find half an hour or an hour, maybe when we’re watching a series and churn out ten of them for the next few weeks. Genius.

[10] The Tenth One

Well, you don’t expect me to do ALL of the work, i hope. So there is space for you to add one. In the comments below. What is a life hack you have found or always done that saves money or time or the planet or helps someone around you or brings people together? If you have more than one, please share away but don’t leave without adding something to this list…