Friday, September 2, 2011

Clothes Closet: Clothing Only, Please

The Love INC Clothes Closet is a ministry designed to provide wearable clothing for men, women, youth and children as a way to help during hard times. This ministry provides a needed boost for many people by providing the clothing for free.

YOU can help us out! A trend is developing that endangers the continuation of the Clothes Closet ministry. We want to keep it running! Last year the Clothes Closet served more than 7,400 people -- our neighbors right here in Gallatin County!

Here is the threat to the continuation of the Clothes Closet: people dumping at the door during off-hours.

As one example: this week, someone dumped many heavy bags of unusable "stuff" that they wanted to get rid of, leaving it at our door. The "stuff" even included open paint cans and their yellow footprints. Someone -- a Love INC volunteer! -- had to make a special trip, pick all this up, load it into their personal pickup truck and haul it away. This "stuff" filled their entire pickup, leaked paint into the truck, and the volunteer spent his evening hauling it all away for whoever left it at our door.

YOU can help us out in countering this threat to the continued operation of the Clothes Closet. First, please, please, do not dump at our door. The Clothes Closet is only open with limited hours, and people just like you come and volunteer their time to make it run. We have only volunteers who run the Closet during those limited hours -- there is no staff, nor anyone else around to sort through and dispose of "stuff" dumped at our door.  Can you spread the word, too?

We appreciate and welcome the good-condition clothing that people donate so we can run the Clothes Closet. This is a blessing to hundreds of families and individuals in our area. However, again because only a small team of volunteers do all the work during just a few hours per month, it is very difficult for those people to sort out all the unusable clothing and other "things" that people have begun to drop off at the Clothes Closet.

Stained, torn, ragged, well-worn and seriously out of date clothing are not usable. The volunteers who come to work for a few hours end up personally bagging up unusable clothing, and everything that is not clothing. They then have to haul it to their own garbage cans at home, or take it somewhere. Please, help our volunteers out. They volunteer their time.  The job of sorting out really poor, unusable clothing (and non-clothing "stuff") is becoming a very heavy burden.

Please spread the word to people you know. Love INC's Clothes Closet is not a thrift store. It is not a place to dump non-clothing items a person no longer wants. It is a special clothing ministry to demonstrate tangible love to people who need good, wearable clothing and cannot buy it. Please, help the Love INC volunteers who enjoy their work but don't want to drown in throw-away "stuff."

Thank you for making the Clothes Closet possible! This is a wonderful ministry touching thousands of lives! Our volunteers love serving there and we want the Clothes Closet to continue to thrive!