For the sixth year in a row University Facilities and Services organized the annual Move-out Cleanout program to collect unwanted food and clothing from students at move-out time. This year, a grand total of 17,429 pounds of clothing and shoes and 2,379 pounds of food was collected!
Through this program, collection boxes are placed out for a three week period so that students can drop unwanted goods off at their leisure. All unopened non-perishable food goes to the Open Door Mission of Rochester while clothing and shoes goes to Planet Aid.
While this year’s numbers are a little shy of the record-breaking collection we held last year, nearly 20,000 pounds of goods diverted from the landfills and put in the hands of those in need, is something to be quite proud of. Electronics are still being consolidated and will be recycled through this program too.
Similarly, the Dump and Run program run by SA funded group Grassroots went very well this year. There were plenty of volunteers and participants for this year’s collection. Final results will be tallied and goods collected through this program will be available for resale during Orientation in the fall.
In the spirit of Meliora, a few of us also went to visit RIT this past Friday to see their Goodbye Goodbuy program in action. The above picture is of just a few of the many volunteers who were helping out to collect and sort goods at their program. We were so impressed with the extensiveness of their program and thank them for accommodating us and showing us how they manage to collect over 80,000 pounds of goods! Though their program is at a much larger scale than ours, we got some great tidbits that we can take back to make our own programs ever better!