#impossible.com

The Government assures us that substantial spending cuts are the only way to "balance the books". It doesn't want to slash the funding of non-profit organisations providing essential services to vulnerable groups, but "difficult choices" have to be made - so cut them some slack, OK?

Sure, it could have avoided legal aid cuts that will deny many people access to justice, or prevented steep increases in rough sleeping as a result of slashing funding to homelessness services. But then how would we afford the really important stuff?

Stuff like Lily Cole's new website, impossible.com

As Lily explained (at great length) in her somewhat verbose Comment is Free article yesterday, the website is basically a combination of Freecycle and Noel Edmonds favourite The Secret. Only it's loads more clever and important because it's based on her Cambridge undergraduate thesis, and conversations she had with various wise, foreign and/or poor people.

The idea is that people post their "wishes", then other individuals benevolently make them come true. Lily hopes to foster a "gift economy" not as an alternative to capitalism (she's very clear that she is not anti-capitalist, indeed Impossible is set up as a profit-making business) but as some sort of supplement to it.

Here are some examples of recent wishes made on the site:

Somewhat ambitious...

More ambitious...

Whoa. Still, nothing wrong with dreaming big.

Control a cat's behaviour?? Let's not get carried away!

Hopefully there are some people on the site who can make these wonderful dreams come true!

Lily's belief in the "gift paradigm" is perhaps not surprising, given she herself was recently gifted £200,000 of taxpayers' money by the Cabinet Office’s Innovation in Giving fund

£200k could go a long way in a lot of different places, so we're glad the government feels confident making "tough decisions" about the most expedient way to allocate funding.

Still, it's a shame there isn't some more money to go around, so that slightly less brilliant (but still important) projects didn't have to close.

But perhaps the "gift economy" can provide the solution! We've tried making a few wishes ourselves on Lily's website. Fingers crossed...

Can you grant this wish? Pop over to impossible.com and let us know.

Think you might be able to help with this? Head over to impossible.com!

Think you can keep the camp open? You know what to do.

be part of the gift culture with impossible: a social giving network that shows your wishes to the people who may be able to grant them and shows you wishes you may be able to grant! everything is free. everything is possible. the only currency is an abundant one: saying thank you.

Back in 2012, stunning English model and actress Lily Cole served as ambassador for the Body Shop’s Beauty With Heart campaign to emphasize the brand’s fair-trade, cruelty-free values. More recently, she launched Impossible.com, a social network aimed at creating a “peer-to-peer gift economy.” And now, this do-gooder is continuing her altruism with a brand new line of Brazilian rainforest-sourced rubber jewelry for StylePick.com. Cole personally designed the line in an effort to help preserve rainforests by using wild rubber over plantation rubber.

“Right now there isn’t a market distinction between wild rubber and plantation rubber,” Cole told The Telegraph. “Essentially it costs more to produce wild rubber because it’s a much more manual, less industrialised process; local tappers have to go into the forest and tap the trees accordingly. In the short-term the land is more valuable for cattle farming, so currently there isn’t enough of a financial incentive to do wild rubber trading, to protect the forest from being deforested.”

Though sadly, every piece flew off the virtual shelves within the first 24 hours of launching, more rings, earrings, and necklaces are on their way. Prices range from £10 for earrings to £25 for necklaces and 100 percent of profits from every sale are donated to the WWF and Sky Rainforest Rescue. Affordable-chic jewelry for a great cause? Now that’s what we’d call a win-win.