It's that time of year: students are moving out of their dorms and leaving behind oodles and oodles of things that are in perfectly good shape, but that they can't fit in cars or suitcases as they drive/fly back home.
For about a dozen years, a small group of people at my college organized a giant yard sale from the stuff that was left behind: it filled the gym, and pricing things at $1 a bag, we still raised thousands and thousands of dollars for charity. It was an incredible feel-good thing: keeping so much stuff out of landfills, delighting our neighbors (including recent immigrants and other low-income people) with amazing deals on furnishing their home, and gifting charities with big checks.
But it was also an incredible amount of work, too much work for people to figure out how to keep doing at a super-hectic time of the academic year. Eventually, the organizers understandably burned out, and the program died.
There's a new group trying something smaller, but on a smaller scale (and without the yard-sale component--instead going more directly to charitable groups that need furnishings for their clients). I volunteered to help; I've spent about two hours helping to sort/count stuff that they'd collected from departing students, and I'll spend two more hours later today as well. As a perk, I get to nab a few things that'd be useful to me. I've held off purchasing mirrors for our condo for just this reason, and sure enough, there were at least 15 full-length mirrors in the mosh-pit. Now one of those mirrors is hanging on my bathroom door, just where I needed it.
I also picked up a few storage cubes that I'm using to pack away my winter clothes on a high closet shelf, and some little notebook disks. These are things I know I don't need to buy, if I'm just willing to wait for the seasonal bonanzas the come from being at a small college.
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