The Kansan printed a great story about our thrift shop last Saturday.  It’s true–we’ve seen a significant increase in donations from the community, and we’ve had to get creative with our processing and marketing.  Our Summer Saturday Sales are one way to keep things flowing smoothly.  Creating more paid and volunteer jobs for the community has been another strategy.

However, we’ve started noticing an unfortunate by-product of the Kansan’s story–people seem to be nervous about  dropping off their donations, thinking we’re already too full.  Not true!  We’re actually well equipped to handle a large volume of donations continually throughout the week.  If we ever to reach our capacity, we can usually dig ourselves out within a couple of hours and open our receiving door once again.  This rarely happens, though.

Another little note: we do actually take furniture donations.  We love them!

The internal conversation about furniture has more to do with expansion–increasing our capacity to process more, in order to meet the needs of the community.  It doesn’t hurt that an expansion like this could also increase our financial giving to projects here and around the world that respond to basic human needs and work for peace and justice.

We love that our local paper is keeping its finger on the pulse of the community.  And we love that our donors share their honest feedback.  We all need each other!