Clothing Your Community

Valentine's Day morning, I took the boyfriend and went downtown to volunteer at that weekend-long Clothing Your Community event that fellow VISTA Maureen and I didn't have to work at afterall.



The building was set up exactly like a Salvation Army or Goodwill -- but it was completely FREE.



We were put to work as "personal shoppers," basically helping families find what sizes they were looking for, lugging their bags so they had two hands to shop, and enforcing the 20-minute shopping limit. Needless to say, I was bad at the enforcement part, heh. I think all my families were in there for a half hour or more...ah well.



All the volunteers were told to pull something red from the bins to wear in honor of V-Day and in order to distinguish ourselves from the shoppers. I grabbed a red scarf and then noticed it happened to have a little V-Day-appropriate marking on it. Cuteness.




The event was supposed to be a one-weekend event -- but in only a little over three weeks, I guess the event collected 85 tons of donated clothing!

85

TONS!!

Wow.

Check out this pile of bags of clothes still to be sorted! This photo doesn't even do it justice. It was an ENTIRE ROOM full of trash bags.



So they are going to keep things set up as an ongoing event as long as there are still clothes to give away. Awesome.

The event was a partnership between Cherry Street Mission, LaSalle Cleaners, Pro-Pak Industries, The Andersons, Cumulus Broadcasting, Fifth Third Bank, Toledo Free Press, YMCA and JCC of Greater Toledo, WTOL and H.O.T. Printing and Graphics.