Not-for-Profit Navigator
With Nicole Aebi-Moyo - SalesFix For Purpose Practice Lead
I have a confession that sits a little awkwardly with the theme of this month’s newsletter. For someone who loves a good garage sale, I do a worrying amount of online shopping. The “we forgot the thing, can it be here tomorrow?” kind.
Which is probably why my ears pricked up when I came across the Garage Sale Trail on LinkedIn and reached out to Barbara Gill for a chat. I live in the inner north of Melbourne, where little community groups like the Good Karma Network and the Darebin Hard Rubbish Heroes spin up to rehome perfectly good stuff that would otherwise hit landfill. I love them. But I’ve also wondered whether they’ve quietly changed the way we think about secondhand goods. In our house we now have a rule: if we don’t think we’ll get more than a hundred bucks for it, we just give it away. So I was curious. Is the humble garage sale dying, or is something bigger going on?
Turns out, something bigger is going on.
A happy accident in Bondi
The Garage Sale Trail has been running for sixteen years now. It started, as Barbara puts it, as a happy accident: two friends in Bondi looking at all the perfectly usable things being left on the kerbside, wondering what would happen if a whole community held its garage sales on the same weekend. Divert things from landfill, reduce illegal dumping, help neighbours meet neighbours. There was something there.
That something is now a genuine monster of a movement. The Trail works with just over ninety councils across every state in Australia, and nearly 400,000 Australians buy and sell secondhand goods over two weekends each November. Six months of the year the team spends prepping and bringing partners on board, and the other six months delivering the campaign. It’s the one thing they do, all year round, and they do it properly.
The gateway drug to living more sustainably
The Trail isn’t trying to preach to the already-converted. Its big focus is reaching people who aren’t thinking about reducing waste at all.
And a garage sale is the perfect way in, because nearly everyone understands it and it’s fun. People don’t lay their old things out on the driveway for environmental reasons. They do it to make a bit of money, or to have a natter with a neighbour. But somewhere in the middle of that very ordinary Saturday, they realise reuse feels good, and they get inspired to keep going. Barbara calls it a gateway drug, and I think that’s exactly right. Behaviour change happens not by lecturing people, but by making the first step easy and enjoyable.
It stays accessible too. The average price of an item on the Trail is eight dollars, and Barbara is clear that it should stay that way, because it puts goods within reach of people who don’t have a lot of money. In a cost of living crunch, that matters. Participation grew around ten per cent last year, driven largely by hip pockets rather than hearts, and the format is evolving, with more thrift markets appearing alongside the classic driveway sale.
When the Trail is the only shop in town
One thing that Barbara said that stopped me in my tracks. She shared that around sixty per cent of those ninety councils are regional communities, and for some of them the Trail is not just a nice weekend. She told me about the mayor of Alice Springs, who described the Garage Sale Trail as the weekend his town has a department store: the weekend you can actually buy anything.
If you’re four hours from the nearest big city, and the drone deliveries the rest of us grumble about not having yet are pure science fiction, a coordinated day of secondhand selling isn’t just sustainability. It’s access. It’s a genuine local marketplace that otherwise doesn’t exist.
The enabler, not the star
So what is the Garage Sale Trail’s actual role in all this? Barbara described it beautifully: they’re the enabler. The community does all the hard work and generates all the impact. The Trail builds the website where you list your sale, runs a media campaign that reaches around twenty million Australians and pulls roughly half a million people to the site in the November window, and quietly removes the barriers that stop people taking part.
That last bit is the clever design. No space to sell from home? Here’s a free market nearby you can join. Don’t know how to price your bits and pieces? Here are some tips. They think hard about the friction, and they design it out, so that saying yes to a garage sale is the easy choice.
What this has to do with your Salesforce
(I promise there's a link)
I’ve spent a lot of these newsletters banging on about meeting your community where they are. Back in June I made the case that nobody loves the portal you built, and that engagement happens when you come to people rather than asking them to remember yet another login.
The Garage Sale Trail is that idea at national scale. Nobody is forced to log into a clunky system. The infrastructure sits underneath, coordinating ninety councils, hundreds of thousands of participants and a national media push, while the community gets on with the fun part. Technology is the enabler, not the star.
That’s the question I’d put to any For Purpose organisation coordinating a community, whether that’s volunteers, donors, fundraisers, partner agencies or the people you serve. Is your technology removing barriers, or quietly adding them? Is it doing the coordinating in the background so your people can do the meaningful work, or is it one more thing they have to remember to log into?
When your platform plays the enabler role, the way the Trail does, the whole thing lifts. Your community feels supported rather than managed, and you get to spend your energy on impact instead of admin.
If that’s a question you’re wrestling with, whether it’s engaging a volunteer base, running a peer to peer campaign, or coordinating partners at scale, I’d genuinely love to chat about how we help organisations get the technology out of the way.
And if you’re reading this in August, you’re reading it at exactly the right time. The Trail goes live around now, ahead of those November weekends. If your organisation, or your council, or just your street wants to be part of it, this is the moment to get involved.
If you need any assistance understanding anything in this edition of NFP Navigator please reach out at [email protected], I am always happy to help.
Until next time,
Nicole
Coming Up in 2026
Garage Sale Trail: two weekends in November. Now’s the time to register your sale or get your community on board.
True Blue Blazing: 20 October 2026, Marvel Stadium. Tickets are on sale now. Speaker announcements coming soon. Day long Salesforce community conference: networking and learning on a deep scale
Australian Salesforce user groups
If you use Salesforce and you’re not part of a user group, you’re missing out! There’s over 30 groups in Australia and New Zealand alone, and many now meet online so there’s no excuse for not joining in and finding out more.