January 11, 2025

Don't donate a headache

Give generously to your local charity shop. But try to give thoughtfully too

The association of a new year with a fresh start means that lots of people are decluttering right now1. And in many cases, decluttering means a trip or two to the local charity shop.

Charity shops encourage this, putting up posters in the  post-Christmas period suggesting themselves as a suitable new home for unwanted gifts or anything that's just been superseded. When it works well, everyone wins. The donor gets to free up some space at home, the customer gets a new-to-them bargain, and the charity gets funds they can use to serve their mission.

When it works well.

I want to be charitable here (no pun intended). I'm sure people don't mean their donations to be a headache for the charity they give them to. If you've had those worn and stained clothes, those chipped ceramics, that battered furniture, in your eyeline for long enough, you probably look past the damage to the point that you no longer see it. Or perhaps they're thinking that someone, somewhere, might want a fixer-upper project and we are the right people to find them. Surely nobody would make use of a charity shop to offload their rubbish?

The problem is that donations we can't sell, however good your intentions, make our job harder. We can reject the things we know at a glance we won't, or in some cases legally can't, sell, but if the problem isn't immediately obvious, we end up on the hook for disposal costs. Hauling rubbish to the tip costs money, and uses volunteers' time that could be used more productively. Filling the warehouse with items that won't sell displaces items that will.

And people get endlessly defensive when you explain that. I'm being deliberately cagey about which charity I volunteer for, because my manager was concerned that naming them would make them "look ungrateful". A lot of people seem to believe that charity shops, by virtue of soliciting donations, are subject to the Law of Beggars Can't Be Choosers.

But "beggars can't be choosers" only means that you shouldn't nitpick when someone does you a favour. If the "favour" is actually making things worse, even literal beggars are well within their rights to decline it. Asking for help doesn't mean abandoning all semblance of boundaries.

Would it be nice if someone could take in broken items and match them with people who would enjoy fixing them? Undoubtedly it would, but that's not the role of a charity shop. Our role is to take in donations we can sell within a reasonable time, so that we can raise funds for our mission. And to be honest, we often have our hands full staying on top of that.

There are a handful of organisations that do fill that niche, and if you think there should be more, you can always set one up yourself. I might even volunteer with you, because I love saving things from landfill. A dedicated centre for salvaging what's broken sounds like a lovely idea, and far more helpful than complaining that charity shops aren't set up to do that.

Setting up a whole new organisation is a big commitment, and it's understandable that not many people are up for that. But the alternative is to work with what already exists. The only recycling centre I know locally is operated by the council, and it's essentially a euphemism for the tip.

Unfortunately, that's where ill-advised donations are going to end up, whether you bring them to us first or take them along yourself. So really, isn't it in everyone's interests to look at your donations with a clear eye before you drop them off, just to make sure you aren't using us as a middleman?