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In the great river of used clothing that courses through America, our family plays the part of sieve. Oh, I’m not going to moan and complain. I really am grateful. People could be throwing these clothes away, or selling them — but instead, they wash and fold them and save them for us.
I generally take anything that anyone offers, and — let me repeat — I really am really, really grateful. I have no idea how much it costs to outfit eight children, because I almost never have to buy them anything. It’s actually been a long time since anyone has dumped a boatload of junk on us without asking first, and most people are extremely tactful, almost apologetic, when offering me things. To any donor to the Fisher family who’s reading this: I’m not talking about you! If I said “thank you,” I meant it!
But everyone’s generosity does leave me with a few problems (problems which, I hasten to add, I am happy and grateful to have). There are several categories of clothing in the bags we receive:
(1) Great stuff that we’re thrilled to wear. This is actually mostly what we get. And again: I AM GRATEFUL.
(2) Decent stuff that we already have plenty of, like navy blue shorts or pink sweatshirts. I’m also grateful for these, just not in capital letters.
(3) Stuff that is objectively nice, but puzzling as a gift to our family. My husband, for instance, is 6’4″, and my sons are ages 6 and 8. So why the half-a-dozen pairs of obese midget grampa slacks?
(4) Crummy stuff. I assume that these items are in the “donate” bag rather than the trash because some sentimental mother couldn’t bear the idea of throwing away the last vestiges of her dear children’s tender years at home. And so, blinded by affection and nostalgia, she didn’t realize that she’s giving us a large collection of stained, pilled, ripped, stretched-out, unwearable rags.
(5) Expensive clothing in excellent condition, suitable for lavishly outfitting one’s daughter for a lucrative career as a hooker.
So:
The great stuff, we keep, of course.
The crummy stuff and the hooker stuff, we throw away (or occasionally designate as costumes).
But what about everything else? The stuff that’s perfectly good, but not needed? It’s not so easy to dispose of it. I can’t throw it away, when I know there are kids out on the street with nothing warm or decent to wear (no, not my kids. My kids have plenty of clothes, remember? They just dress like homeless people to make me look bad). I used to store it indefinitely, but that’s just as wasteful as throwing it away.
You’d think I could donate it, but it turns out the local charity thrift stores are already up to their eyeballs in decent clothing, and have put out notices threatening police action against midnight dumpers.
I could consign it, but having watched my mother wash, iron, fold, transport, champion, and ultimately earn $1.32 for the vast quantities of used clothing she used to sell, I’m not even going to try. It’s the same story on eBay — I was making fractions of a cent per hour of labor.
Then I noticed those yellow Planet Aid donation bins everywhere. The perfect solution! No questions asked, no hassle, just slow down the car, chuck it in the general direction of the bin, and drive away.
But the fine print on the bins reveals a partial list of their services. Call me paranoid, but any organization that promotes “education,” “health,” and “HIV prevention” services to third world countries while “protecting the environment” is not going to get so much as a shrunken tee ball T-shirt from me.
Also, Planet Aid has recently been accused of being a profitable scam, an exploiter of the third world, even a cult. So those handy bins are out.
There must be a patron saint for people drowning in used clothing. I tell you, I’ve suffered so much over this issue, I’m practically a candidate myself. Someone clearly interceded for me in my suffering, for lo, there appeared on the side of the road a bin. It was nestled into the weeds next to the utility shed of a volunteer fire department in a tiny town we pass through on our way over the mountain to the dentist.
And it wasn’t Planet Aid or Mengele’s Happy Social Engineering Club or any other shady organization. This bin belonged to the good old Salvation Army. Our local Salvation Army sells clothes cheap, it gives them away if you apply for a voucher, it hires poor people, and it even has a free bread table. It also works with ex-convicts, campaigns against pornography, and fights human trafficking. No, they’re not Catholic, and no, I’m sure they’re not perfect. But they are pretty good. I wish they had the money to put out enough bins to compete with Planet Aid.
So now I have a policy: I accept everything, absolutely everything. I sort it as soon as I get it, and anything that I don’t want goes straight into the back of my van. And then all I have to do is wait for the next dentist appointment (which is never more than a week or two away), and my problem is solved. That’s a whole ministry in itself, even though it doesn’t show up on the Salvation Army’s website: giving me an easy and morally sound way of unloading it all.
And for that — did I mention? — I am grateful.
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(Cross-posted at Inside Catholic’s Inside Blog)
Salvation Army is the one non-Catholic religious organization that I am comfortable donating to.
We have the St Vincent dePaul Society here. They have bins located in the parking lot of our Catholic Church. You just have to make sure that the clothes are bagged and dump them in.
I love Salvation Army. I like to shop there, too–because you’re donating to charity AND recycling AND being a good steward of your financial resources, all in one fell swoop! I’ve yet to buy back my own stuff, though I don’t put it past myself to do so.
My youngest son still jokes about the jackets and coats I used to pick up at yard sales and thrift stores. They were either too long sleeved or too short because I bought ahead of time to compensalte for growth and it did not always even out. We also traded clothes among family and friends. A friend told me to watch yard sales in a particular affluent neighborhood for good stuff with good prices. I benefited from that advice and so did my five youngsters. The best place for my donations now are library fund raisers and other local projects.
As soon as I started reading your plight I thought of SA. It’s the only option I have left.
We used to have St. Vincent de Paul thrift stores in my area but they have all closed and they raise their money thru other means.
I no longer donate to Goodwill. They are building new stores right and left but I see little evidence beyond the new stores of how they are spending all that money they make.
There are other charities that take donations but they sell them for pennies on the pound to who knows where and take the money. I won’t donate usable items unless I know they are being resold to those that can’t afford to buy new.
Eight kids and lots of excess cloth. Why does paper making come to mind? Not necessarily all of it, but it might be an interesting exercise. And you might be able to turn some of the cloth into high-quality rag paper that is more useful than crummy stuff or puzzling stuff.
Or convert the clothing to something else — quilts for example. (Cloth has to be in good shape, possibly a use for the catagory 2 and 3 stuff. Forget using worn-out clothing for that, but used clothing that has been worn a few times and is nearly as good as new is a candidate.) Toys like stuffed animals, too. If you do a good enough job you have your Christmas shopping done. (My wife and I used to make stuffed animals, quilts, etc. and give them to our nieces and nephews when they were little. The kids liked them better than the latest, greatest toys, too.) And if you can get your kids into craft hobbies it is a two-fer.
May I draw readers’ attention to the work of Christian Help of Mingo County? It’s a nonprofit agency that is not officially Catholic but with strong Catholic roots and orientation (founded 15 years ago by an Ursuline sister, run now by a lay Catholic man and a Franciscan sister). We serve thousands of people every year here in the heart of Appalachia (Mingo County, WV).
One of our services is to distribute clothing for free to people in dire need. (We also provide food, transportation, home repairs, help with utility bills, and when the budget allows, dentures.)
We regularly receive boxes of clothes from individuals and stores around the country, usually through the mail, but sometimes through personal delivery by a donor who wants to stay for a few days of direct volunteer service.
There’s the extra step of boxing and mailing, of course, but I can assure anyone that all donated items go directly to people in real need, that recipients are treated with dignity and love, and that everything is distributed for free.
Through our sister agency, ABLE Families (www.ablefamilies.org), we also provide help in escaping the net of poverty in which people find themselves.
So…do you save stuff that your kids will eventually grow into? That is my current plight.
We, too, have eight children and receive bags and bags and bags of donations from friends–and YES, I do appreciate them thinking of us. Because I know how difficult it is to unload used items (we get more than just clothes =)) I see it as a win-win. We don’t have to shop for many items that we don’t have the budget for and friends know that their ‘stuff’ goes to a nice home.
Back to my current plight–do you, Simcha, save things that will eventually fit someone? I know space is an issue for most but I am blessed with a really large laundry/storage room. But my guilt lies in this–do I save stuff for later and thus deny someone else needy to have it now? Am I being too stingy and untrusting–untrusting in that the Lord will provide later when the kids need something…..What say you?
Yes, I know, you do not have time to solve MY problems!!! Thanks for your musings on mothering!
Beth
Beth, I don’t have an official policy yet, because this is the first time in almost 13 years of married life that we’ve had plenty of storage space (my brother-in-law built us an addition with a nice big attic). Previously, I had to store anything not in current use in bins in our tiny bedroom, so I became pretty draconian. Also, I have three girls close in age, then two boys close in age, then three girls close in age — so generally when one kid grows out of something, I just put it in the drawer of the next kid down.
It seems to me that if there are bags and bags of clothing floating around town, you are probably not depriving anyone by storing stuff. There’s clearly plenty to go around, you know?
I’m sure there’s a line you can cross, when just storing things becomes hoarding – but I really don’t think that saving clothes for your own children is stingy or untrusting.
Of course, my credentials for giving advice are as follows: I have a computer.
Beth: Having purchased in advance at garage sales, I recommend not saving more than one or two years. Styles change and it’s hard to predict growth spurts. We bought way in advance and had some stuff that was not useable….D
It looks like the Salvation Army does a better job of using its donations than the CCHD does! Glad you found it. I will follow suit.
It’s not easy being Green, is it?
This is why I bet our carbon footprints, on a per-person basis, are a lot less heavy on the environment than those of Al Gore and his offspring.
Notwithstanding the carbon handprints of Sally and her kids.
Yeah, my whole basement is a carbon footprint right now. Or handprint. Whatever the difference would be.
On saving clothes: I have two boys five years apart and two girls ten years apart, which makes the clothes-saving thing interesting. And yes, we’re swimming in hand-me-downs, too, for which I am also grateful, let me join that chorus! I find that it is worth it to save things like blazers — I’ve never bought a boy a blazer — and dress shirts, if they don’t get too trashed, which is always the trouble with boys’ clothes. But those church clothes really don’t change appreciably, so if I have a decent set I try to hang onto them.
Girls’ clothes I have winnowed ruthlessly, because that’s just a never-ending tidal wave. My younger daughter does have, for every season, a handful of really nice things which my mother either sewed — I have one of those smocking mothers, and my girls have both worn my childhood dresses — or bought from someplace really wonderful like Hanna Anderssen. Those Hannas hand down in beautiful shape, and when Girl One grew out of them I figured they were worth hanging onto even before I knew there would ever be a Girl Two.
Now when we get hand-me downs, I’ve restricted my three younger kids to what will fit in a laundry basket for each season, which is essentially a week’s worth of clothes, assuming they don’t want to wear the same thing every day, which sometimes they do. I don’t even let them keep these laundry baskets in their rooms — I’m just too embarrassed even to picture in my mind how bad things used to get, floors carpeted with clothing and everybody with nothing to wear to Mass. It was awful, and I was not on top of it, so I went with this Draconian measure.
And now I have boxes of clothes in my laundry room. We don’t have a Salvation Army anywhere nearby, but down the street there’s a little shop called the Good Neighbor Shop, which gives out vouchers for people to buy school clothes and things like that. They’re always having “Buy-One-Get-One-Free” sales, 50-cent sales, etc. We shop there a lot ourselves, and I have got to move at least some of this stuff into my van and take it to them. Maybe if I do it in shifts it won’t seem like so much.
Wow–thanks to all for thoughts on ‘to save or not to save’…will take it all into account when the next ‘shipment’ comes in…which will be soon no doubt with the change of seasons. You know that Danielle Bean gets teary eyed switching out those clothes….
Thank the Lord for hand-me-downs….and even some hand-me-ups–you know, when your kids think you need to wear something a bit more hip…
It could be that the stained rags are in the bag because…the mother sorting them got mixed up between her “trash” bag and her “donate” bag halfway through.
I know this from personal experience, of course. We gets tons of hand-me-downs, but with six stair-step girls I end up giving a fair amount away myself. Sorting through six mountains of clothes gets me turned around every time. So when my 10 year pulls an infant onesie out of her winter bag, oh well. When my friend pulls old stained underwear out of the pile of clothes I just gave her — uh, sorry!
Perhaps you can try Criagslist’s free section? Or freecycle? If you can give a decent description of what you have (eg 2 bags boy’s size 2T and 3T winter clothes) then maybe people who are in need but not out looking would be able to take stuff off your hands and USE it!
In our area, the Salvation Army will even take stuffed animals!
Goodwill won’t do that anymore.
My first pick is always St Vincent de Paul. I know the profits help poor people locally.
You might want to know that the vendors here in the Philippines sell used clothes at the outdoor markets where the poor usually buy stuff. Usually they sell cheap (one dollar for slacks, 50 cents a teeshirt).
Since the clothes are cheaper than the “new” ones (usually Chinese imports) they are welcomed by the poor and even those of us who are middle class.
I don’t see a problem, except that some of this was “given” as charity to some organization, yet the small price/profit involved suggests that it is an efficient way to clothe the poor.
Ditto for used books.