Charity begins at home; Organise your old unwanted items for donations at home rather than dumping in traditional donation boxes
When you drop off a bag of clothes for donation, do you ever wonder where does it all go? Is it really going to someone in need? There are many pathways where your clothes may end up. Some are resold at thrift stores, some are used up as raw materials for creating new clothing, most end up in landfills and some reach their intended destination as donations to needy.
Enter – Online and offline platforms that partner and bridge the gap between donors and NGOs. Most of these platforms work on 2 models –
- Traditional method of Donation boxes in offices, society or Complex:
You can dump your unwanted items in donation boxes kept by some NGO or enterprise. They collect donations in bulk and then starts the exhaustive and tiresome job for them. They then have to segregate items into separate categories manually. This takes a lot of time, effort and labor which could have been avoided in the first place.
- Online at home donation pick up
There are few NGOs/enterprises that collect donated clothing items or unwanted household items from donors and deliver them directly to NGO partners. While this is faster, a lot of times your donations may not reach or benefit the receivers. For example, when you donate a mix of women-wear, mens’-wear and children’s clothing and the donated items reach an NGO that caters to women and children only, the men’s clothing items don’t reach the beneficiaries and end up being unused or discarded.
How Happieesouls is organizing this unorganized sector
Happieesouls functions on a slightly different yet incredibly unique model. We believe in building a community that understands the power of giving.
- We connect directly with grassroot level NGOs, verify them and partner with them by offering them to get enlisted on our website free of cost. That’s right. Unlike a lot of crowdfunding and donation platforms, we do not charge our partner NGOs for enlisting them on our website. We give them a platform to create a profile, an account, and bucket-list detailing all the items and necessities they need. A volunteer can build a website for an NGO for free but the NGO struggles to maintain it. Most of the grassroots NGOs website domains expire and they don’t even know if it is working or not. Our NGO partners do not have to struggle for the maintenance of their website, our platform inherently does it for them for free.
- Our website mandates and encourages donors to indicate right quantity against each category of clothing/good. We sensitize our donors about the importance of segregating and marking exact quantity of items. This helps our delivery partners in mapping the donations to right NGOs and measuring impact. Structuring and organizing it right at the donor level, helps us in sending women clothing to a girl orphanage and vice versa. We have donated more than 10k items of clothing, utensils and furniture in the past 3 months.
- We do not store or keep a stock of any of the donated items. Therefore, your donations reach the NGOs on same day in a matter of few hours. We deliver utensils and furniture to the right partner where it can be directly utilized and share picture of the same with the donor to create transparency.
- We also provide next day donation pick up service. In the event, that your donations have to be picked up on priority, you can schedule next day donation pickups and we deliver straight to our NGO partners in need. This ensures maximum sustainability and proper utilisation of your old unwanted household items.
PS : Bulk furniture pick ups takes 3-5 days. If you are shifting to a new city and want to donate most of your household items, contact us 3-5 days prior to pick up date.
Why do we charge a convenience fee?
Anything for free dilutes transparency. We are on a mission to make online giving space more transparent.
Depending on the volume of your donations, we charge a flat price for pick up service for 2 wheelers, 3 wheelers, 4 wheelers and trucks. This is a logistics and convenience fee that our donors pay for their donations to reach safely to NGOs who will benefit from these donations. It is really a minimal fee for logistics and transportation of delivery of donations done by our delivery partners. So, your preloved clothes and good get a new life for a nominal fee.
We believe our ethos would bring some structure in this otherwise disjointed industry. After all, goodness is the only investment that never fails.
Do you have unused, 👚👕old cloths and other items that are lying in your wardrobe? Do you know it can be luxury to many in need?
Click on the link to book your donation pick up today 🙂
