Hello Welcome to yours2share's February 2010 newsletter. New boat share club: Euro Yacht Share Sharing, community and quality of life Plus a selection of recent ads to whet your appetite. New boat share club: Euro Yacht Share I was over at the London Boat Show a few weeks ago and met up with all the fractional boat companies and boat share club operators exhibiting there. Some I know well, others were new to me. yours2share specialises in enabling like-minded private individuals to find partners to create private syndicates. But we also keep an eye on the commercial boat share offerings. The first is fractional ownership, where the agent sells shares in boats and once they are all sold, it is up the owners to manage the boat (although they often retain the agent to do this). The second is a boat share club, where the operator effectively rents the boat out to a limited number of people and the people buy membership (or rent in advance) giving them the right to use the boat at certain times over a given time period. One of the new boat share clubs is Euro Yacht Share run by Scott Christie and I had a long chat with him. Scott is a successful businessman from County Durham who has a recently acquired passion for boats, particularly motor yachts in lovely locations like France's Cote d'Azur. Like so many business owners I speak to (many of whom own shares in private boat syndicates) Scott pragmatically realised that he wasn't going to be using his brand new boat, a full Mediterranean spec Sealine 42/5, enough to justify the costs. So he set about finding a way of sharing the boat and thus created Euro Yacht Share. In the process he's found he loves this new business and is planning to buy and share several more boats located around the Mediterranean. He is selling two and five year packages (from £8500 or about 1/3 of the cost of chartering) which give the member the right to use the boat for a week each year. This one-off payment includes maintenance, management, moorings and insurance but not fuel and flights. There are no annual charges, which, as anyone who has owned a boat in the south of France will tell you, can be considerable. For 2010 the Sealine will be moored in Marines de Cogolin, near St Tropez and Scott intends to move each boat every year to a new mooring in the same area of coastline. Scott's generated considerable interest in Euro Yacht Share, and he's going to be on the boat in France for a couple of months between 17th April and mid-May giving prospective members a 24 hour trial. If you would like to join him, give him a call on 0800 408 3922, email him on scott@euroyachtshare.com or click for a free brochure . Sharing, community and quality of life When I started yours2share, I didn't realise that I was starting a social enterprise, I just wanted to help people share stuff. As the number of private syndicates that were helped by yours2share increased, I also became aware that if as the number of partners in a private syndicates increases substantially, it becomes a co-operative. Over time yours2share has created a well established forum for people sharing property, boats and aircraft. It also enables people to share land, gardens and allotments, for food and vegetables as well as animals such as hens, goats, horses, and bees. We've also helped people to share cars as informal car clubs: buying a car between three and six people in a street or village. The principles of sharing, the issues that must be agreed to make a sharing arrangement work, are basically the same, whether you are sharing a £1million yacht or a vegetable plot at the end of the garden. The last year I moved to a small town in south Norfolk, a rural corner of East Anglia and I've become immersed in a rural lifestyle and economy. Over the last few weeks, I've been using the social networks much more, particularly Twitter, and all the strands of yours2share and my lives, seem to have come together in the guise of the Plunkett Foundation and various projects in which it is involved. The Plunkett Foundation promotes and supports co-operatives and social enterprises in rural communities worldwide. One of the Plunkett Foundation's projects is the lottery funded MakeLocalFoodWork, where it works with a range of other major partners including Co-operativesUK, the trade association for all types of co-operative enterprise throughout the UK, and the Soil Association which works to improve the public's understanding of the impact of different methods of food production on health and the environment. The MakeLocalFoodWork project is a collection of projects all designed to 'reconnect people and land through local food increasing access to fresh, healthy, local food with clear, traceable origins'. If you want to know more about supporting rural communities, do visit the Plunkett Foundation's website, and if food issues interest you, have a look at the MakeLocalFoodWork website. If you just want somewhere to "grow your own" or would like someone to make use of your garden, here are yours2share's landshare listings and landshare guidance. And finally, here are a few of yours2share's recent ads that I really like. Selected ads are entirely my choice, but the quality of the pictures is the key factor. Remember this if you are posting an ad!

1/13 shares, 2 bed, 2 bath renovated monastery, Le Muguet, Uzes, France 1/3 share, Jeanneau Sunrise 35, Port Solent, Hampshire Experienced rider looking for horse share, Guildford, Surrey 1/7 share, Cessna F150, Cranfield, Bedfordshire 1/4 shares, 3 bed, 2 bath, beautiful palazzo (townhouse) in Todi, Umbria, Italy 1/3 shares, Southerly 110, Swing Keel, Lymington, Hampshire Mercedes Mclaren SLR Roadster, private syndicate Irish sports horse available to share, Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire Furnished double room to rent weekdays in Portchester, Fareham, Hampshire

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