Think before you donate

It’s the most wonderful time of the year: The time when the spirit of giving abounds as we pile our shopping carts with items to pack in shoeboxes for Operation Christmas Child, select a name from the Salvation Army tree to fulfill a child’s wish or prepare gift bags for residents at long-term care homes.

So much fun. I love buying stuff to give away. Thinking of need and circumstances, I work with an image of the pleasure or relief it will provide for the recipient – especially following an unexpected tragedy or crisis such as the tornado that hit Arkadelphia years ago.

We all want to reach out and express our thoughts.

But sometimes we need to consider our gift in the reality of how it will be seen and received. Would you or your family want to receive the donation? Will it be useable and accepted at the intended location?

After the tornado hit Arkadelphia in 1997 my son volunteered to help wherever he could be most useful. Organizers assigned him to sort through the donations of items and clothes to separate the useable from the dirty, torn or greatly outdated. He talked about the items that simply went to the trash pile such as the gallon cans of dried eggs or that were unacceptable such as the torn, worn, outdated clothing.

I don’t like to see huge trash bins filled with donated clothes. I do like the idea that responsible donation centers sort out what cannot be used locally. “Of the roughly 2 million tons of used clothing Americans recycle each year, less than half is ever worn again: 30 percent is cut up for use as industrial rags, and another 20 percent is shredded for couch stuffing and home insulation. Those clothes that continue as clothes — some 860,000 tons valued at nearly $700 million a year, according to the Department of Commerce — are next worn in Phnom Penh, Cambodia or Mombasa, Kenya,” according to vice.com.

It is good to know that even my worn clothes have a secondary use, but I need to make sure the organization has established an outlet other than the local landfill.

But what about non-clothing items. It is easy to think “surely these poor folks in these circumstances can find a use for this item.”

Perhaps that is true. I know that I gather and donate gently used religious literature and media for Love Packages in Butler, Ill. A couple of times a year we deliver boxes with Bibles, Sunday School lessons, study books and videos. We want the materials that we have read, heard or used to go somewhere besides to the dump when no one wants to buy it at a yard sale because everyone already studied that book.

In fact, that is the very reasoning for the organization. As the founder looked at leftover, good, clean literature collecting dust on a shelf which he no longer needed, he was impressed, “You are wasting that.” Since the 1970s he has worked hard to send the literature as economically as possible to areas in the world where it will be welcomed. They list what they can not use such as the crafts and busy work pages from church programs.

Last month they added two more items they can no longer accept: VHS tapes and cassettes. People simply do not have access to or use this equipment any longer. With no equipment, even the newest tapes simply take up space – no matter how good the message. No matter how good our intent, there really is no reason to pack them up and pass them along. The reel-to-reel media format has pretty much gone the way of the antique Victrola.

The same is true for the Operation Christmas Child boxes. Most people read and follow the instructions given with the box. Yet, volunteers at the processing centers still find sweets other than hard candies, dangerous objects, fluids and worn out toys or novelties. “Not very many come, but we have to take them out,” said my co-worker Janice McIntyre. who has volunteered at OCC processing centers. Other items are put in the boxes to replace what is removed and the items that will not do for OCC boxes are distributed to other organizations.

In America we all have something to share we should share. Just do it wisely, with the recipient in mind.

(Joan Hershberger is a staff writer at the News-Times and author of “Twenty Gallons of Milk and Other Columns from the El Dorado News-Times.” Email her at joanh@everybody.org)


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