It is estimated that 80% of donated clothing in the United States ends up in charitable organizations for distribution to the needy, and also for funding. Through donating your clothes to charity, you can help someone who really needs and touch someone’s life in an unexpected way. However, the act of charity donation entails more than just picking random unused items from your closet and placing them on donation bins. It involves an extensive donation plan that will often come from your goodwill.
While financial donations are the most common form of donations and often the best way to help, many non-profit organizations are open to other assistance, including food stuff and volunteer work. Often, it’s the little things that you do that matters the most and you don’t have to be extremely rich to donate to whatever course you believe in. So, if you have anything you’d love to donate, it’s important you prepare and organize them in an acceptable way, especially clothing donations.
If your charity donations involve clothes and other related products, there are few steps you can follow whether there will be clothing donations pick up plans or you’ll be dropping them off at the donation bins. These steps include.
Declutter Your Closet
This is your first process to your charity quest and it involves thorough decluttering of your closet space. Here, it’s necessary to create two stockpiles of clothes your normally wear and those you rarely do. This will help you sort out the clothes and get a better understanding of what needs to be donated. Do you really need that many trousers, skirts, t-shirts, shoes, scarf and other accessories? Are you clinging to too many old clothes that don’t even fit properly? These are some of the questions you’d need to ask yourself before tossing away any outfit.
Prepare the clothes
After you’ve finally sorted out the donation items, you’d then need to check all the pockets to make sure you haven’t forgotten anything inside. While charity organizations ensure lost and forgotten items are returned to their respective owners, it can be a daunting task trying to find who owned the garment. The second thing you ought to do is to wash the clothes and although this isn’t mandatory, it’s important to donate clean clothes to encourage thrift resale and also reduce unnecessary work to the charities. In addition, if you have any garment that is torn and cannot be recycled, kindly don’t donate it. In preparation of the clothes, make sure they are completely dry and avoid using perfumed detergents on them to eliminate chances of an allergic reaction to those who’ll be wearing them next.
Properly package your clothing donations
Before scheduling clothing donations pick up, ensure you package the clothes into suitable containers such as tote bags, garbage bags and other bags. You could also consider putting sorting tags on the storage bags to help identify the type of clothing, especially if you are doing a large clothing donation.
What’s your mode of donation
There are few ways your donation can reach the intended party. You can either schedule clothing donations pick up, deliver your donation to the charity store or take the clothes direct to refugee centers or shelters. However, charity pick up and drop offs are most widely used means of donating clothes. Whichever mode use, do it in love.