This little fashion challenge has turned into a big, beautiful community. I am so grateful to be part of this movement to live and dress with less. When you share your Project 333 stories with me, my heart swells and I become even more committed to less stuff and more love.
Please consider this short post an invitation to help demonstrate that we are all in this together and that we are more powerful when we join forces and support each other. We are not alone as we rise above our closet chaos and discover what is most important in life.
Last year we crushed a challenge to donate 1000 clothing items in 3 days. Join the first 2014 challenge to …
Donate 2500 Items in 6 days. (January 28 – Feb 2)
Comment on the Facebook post with the number of items you collect to donate between January 28th and February 2nd. If you don’t like Facebook, you can comment on this post and I’ll tally everything up and announce next week. Please keep things simple and only post your number in one place.
If you post images of the stuff you are donating on Instagram or Twitter, please use hashtag: #project333 so I can find and share them!
Hi Courtney,
Love this challenge…I’m in the midst of decluttering and found a few more things that can go. I’m donating 5 items today!
Hi Courtney,
This sounds like a very admirable and well – meaning challenge. I would like to point out however, that donating clothing to charities and second hand shops is not always the good deed so many of us believe it to be. Only a small percentage of the clothing we donate is sold in stores, and most often a large chunk is bundled up, exported to third world countries and sold there.
There are multiple problems this creates:
– the clothing we believe is being given to the needy is actually being sold and a profit is being made.
– local garment production is being undercut by these donations, and the countries become very dependent on western cast-offs.
– many of these clothes are in shocking condition (not surprising, with the increasing quantity and decreasing quality of most of our clothing), yet the people who buy the bales of clothing rely on reselling them to earn a living.
If you would like to learn more about this, Lucy Siegle covers it very well in her book To Die For, or I have recently written a post on these issues and better strategies to adopt.
I hope together we can find ways to better deal with the clothing we let go of.
Emma –
I have heard that that senario can happen with some companies but I know for a fact that it does NOT happen with The Salvation Army. If people are looking for a great organization to donate to please give to them. But yes please only donate usable items as The Salvation Army often spends more money in man hours going through the items than what is brought in from sales.
Emma I addressed this in my latest post about the challenge. I think there are some valid points here, but I also know that when people get rid of their clutter and have an opportunity to give, they feel lighter and are more motivated to give in other ways.
While I don’t recommend a cycle of buying new things and donating them every season, for the initial declutter, I think giving it away is a great option especially if you can put in the hands of The Salvation Army as Nancy mentioned, a local homeless shelter or other reputable organization.
I’ll check out Lucy’s book too. Thanks for the recommendation!