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TIPS FOR RUNNING YOUR OWN USED LUGGAGE COLLECTION:
Various agencies have different needs. Contact each agency you'd like to help & get the following information:
What type of luggage do they want? For instance, abused women's shelters often do better with luggage on wheels since women have to juggle children in one arm & luggage in the other hand. Homeless people on the street prefer backpacks or duffel bags. Foster children need smaller luggage for moving among homes, but they need large suitcases whenever they move out-of-state. Many agencies seem to prefer soft-sided luggage over the hard-sided pieces. I have found that the little cosmetic cases aren't all that useful to the agencies we targeted: the homeless, abused women, runaway teens, foster kids, detox clients.
How many will they need & how often?
How often can they pick up the luggage? Or will your girls deliver the luggage
to them? In order to protect residents of the abused women's shelters, the
locations of the shelters are not given out. You will have to arrange to meet with a social worker somewhere else.
Here are some things to think about:
What will you do with any luggage you get over and above what will fit into your storage space? Specify that when you announce the collection.
How will you advertise your collection? Remember that you need to allow some lead time when you place an ad in the newspaper. Here are some ideas for spreading the word about your collection:
Write a Letter to the Editor for your local newspaper or community-minded magazine (Families Magazine printed a Letter to the Editor about the project and I heard that it even got broadcast on the radio). Smaller newspapers are more likely to print it than national ones. Most local newspapers have sections that list church-related activities or community-minded events. You might want to post an announcement in one of these columns.
Post notices up on your local grocery food store bulletin boards, library bulletin boards, or any other store bulletin board. Also at the nearby public libraries and community centers. Spread the word about the collection to large community groups in your locale - Kiwaniis (sp?), American Legion posts, Boy Scout troops, Girl Scout troops, other youth groups, churches and synagogues, offices of professionals who most-likely travel a lot.... One very nice lady asked her doctor's office to collect used luggage for this cause. Churches were very generous with used luggage.
If you go to yardsales, type up notices about the collection & pass them out there. If you approach people near the end of the yardsale, they'll often give you the stuff right then & there.
I e-mailed several luggage retailers via the internet, asking them to publicize the effort on their websites since people buying new luggage will have old luggage that's no longer needed. 1-800-Luggage called me. They said they'd soon own the Complement Stores in the Washington, DC, area & would be more than happy to offer customers a discount on their new luggage if they brought in their old luggage to donate to the needy. Well, unfortunately, the used luggage collection collapsed before that could be done, although I heard that LLBean was collecting used luggage at one time, too.
Contact other GS, BS, church, community associations, etc., on the internet or by phone & let them know about the collection.
Be prepared to distribute receipts for the luggage to donors. Who will type up the master copy of the receipt? How will you fund copying it? Where will the receipts be made available to the donors? Are you a non-profit agency or will you need to get receipts from the agencies that take the luggage?
Perhaps you'll want to keep some type of log of the donations showing the name of the donar & the # of pieces of luggage given by him. Also another log that shows when luggage was picked up, by what agency, and how many pieces the agency took. (I wish I had done this.) You can use it later to show how successful or unsuccessful your collection was, too.
Things for you to think about:
Where will you store the luggage? How much storage space you have will affect what type of luggage you want to collect. If you don't have much storage space, you might prefer to limit your collection to duffel bags & backpacks and maybe only small suitcases. Remember to lay cardboard beneath your luggage if you use any storage unit that isn't temperature controlled (to avoil mold & mildew). Check with storage facilities and churches to see if they'll loan some space to you. Do your helpers have room in their homes to store the luggage until needed?
Don't have the time or resources to do all of this? Then just do this - call around the various non-profit agencies that you think might need used luggage to assess their need. Then write to the editor of your local newspaper or post a website or put up flyers at your local grocery store to get the word out about the need.
