Give Back: Donate Gently Used Clothing to Local Second Hand Stores
Are you running out of room in your closet now that you had to bring in your winter apparel from storage? Every time something comes out of the wash are you trying to cram that sweater in and have to use your muscles and develop a strategy to do so? We think it’s time for you to donate your gently used clothing to local second hand stores!
Why Should You Donate Your Clothes?
Donating your clothes to a local second hand store helps to give back to the community you live in. However, you need to make sure that the second hand store you are giving your donated items to uses the funds they make to give back somehow. The Arc Stores in Chico, Paradise and Oroville do this! Believe it or not, some other second hand stores don’t, and instead take the money for their own gain.
Why the Arc Stores?
Job training for those with disabilities
The Arc Stores have a training program called the Day Program that gives jobs to those with developmental disabilities. The program helps these individuals learn how to interact with society, learn the structure of a work environment, general daily tasks, etc.
Some examples of what they do/learn:
- Sort items
- Interact with customers
- Price items
- Categorize products
- Develop work skills
- Learn to work for a paycheck
- Follow instructions
- Programs for families
Parts of the profits that are made from items sold from The Arc Store go to funding family support programs. These programs are vital to the families of disabled individuals, but the programs do not receive funding from government grants. They exist merely off of the profits made from The Arc Stores.
- General support groups
- Hispanic support group
- Parents with Down syndrome children’s group
- Parents with autistic children’s group
- Saturday children’s group
- Family Support Groups [Respite Care]
These family support programs offer a variety of efforts designed to strengthen families with special needs children. These programs not only offer support but education, resource assistance, specialized courses, etc.
Recycling
Instead of throwing away things that don’t work or are outdated that The Arc Store can’t sell, we recycle it.
Items that we recycle:
- Clothes-when we receive clothes that are not sellable [too dirty or torn] we give them to a company that recycles them into rags and other linens.
- Metal-when we receive items such as old work out machines or washers we send them off to recycle the metal, which is salvageable even when the item doesn’t work.
- Electronics-when we receive electronics like old TV’s or computer monitors we recycle them through an electronic waste company.
- Cardboard-when you bring your items to us in cardboard boxes, we can take those off your hands to recycle them!
Plus, donating is easy!
All you have to do is drive on up to one of our drop of locations in Chico, Oroville or Paradise and members of our staff will unload your donations from your car. This process will take only a couple minutes out of your day. Plus, if you’d like a receipt to show for your taxes, we give those out too!
We hope to see you with some of your donations at one of our second hand stores soon!
