Student Cast-Offs Get Renewed Life

Polo shirts, torn jeans, threadbare cardigans. What's shabby chic to some graduating seniors is plain shabby to others suddenly confronted with workaday wardrobes and introductory careers outside the collegial shell. But thanks to a student-driven Summer Move-Out Donation Drive this year, student hand-me-downs were given a new lease on lifesomeone else's.
More informal than official, the idea for a move-out donation drive started with loose change. While cleaning out her desk at the end of spring semester, Shea Kinser '09 realized that the coins she had accumulated over the course of several months might make a nice donation to charity, if pooled with other change dug up by students across campus. An encouraging friend then made another suggestion: why not also ask fellow graduates for donations of clothing, furniture, and appliancesthree of the most ubiquitous end-of-year castoffs?
"Either those kinds of things are jettisoned at the end of the school year because they're bulky and can't easily be transported home," says assistant director of facilities and campus services Marsha Tudor, "or, the cost of storing or shipping a departing student's bigger personal items, like an old desktop computer, are too steep."
Inevitably in May, heaps of clothing and scores of computers, televisions, couches, and the like find themselves abandoned in residence halls and student apartmentstoo big for trunks and trucks, and not sensible enough for a suitcase. "The thought of all of those used but perfectly useful items getting thrown away wasn't a pleasant one for me," Kinser says, "so we decided to try to keep as much stuff as possible from being wasted."
Positioning collection boxes in every dorm lounge several days before Commencement, Kinser and classmate Lauren Ohata '09 unveiled their homegrown Summer Move-Out Donation Drive, petitioning for books, clothing, loose change, school supplies, small appliances and, according to flyers, "anything else you don't need anymore."
And in the items rolled: coffee makers, computer cases, lamps, shoes, ties, clocksvirtually anything associated with dorm living, Ohata says.
The response was so overwhelming, in fact, that collection boxes overflowed and frequent sweeps were made to empty them. "I was so glad to have that kind of response," says Ohata. "I worried at first that students wouldn't make the time to set items aside. We wanted to make it as easy as we could for them to donate." And donate they did.
For simplicity's sake, contributions were given to Goodwill, which eliminated the need for volunteersparticularly during finals weekto sort all of the items. "Goodwill just came by and took everything," Ohata says.
Kinser also was proud that by donating, students weren't contributing to the environmentally detrimental cycle of manufacturing and disposal that causes landfills to swell.
In a related but separate recycling move this year, grounds supervisor Marsha Tudor says CMC partnered with Institution Recycling Network (IRN, which already had been working with neighboring campus Harvey Mudd), a program that ships used couches and furniture across the country for disaster relief efforts. So in May, student apartments and dorms were combed for castoff sofas and other furniture, which then were placed in a tractor-trailer on the north end of campus.
Ohata and Kinser hope that next year, the two like-minded programs might merge.
"We'd like to make this a tradition," Ohata says. "It's easy to make a big difference just by simply not throwing something away."