Spring Cleaning

Happy March! We hope this month brings beautiful, sunny weather and joy to you and yours. We’ve been very busy at Castaways lately, especially welcoming Phil Stauffer, a long-time thrift store executive, to our team. His background as Vice President at Goodwill Ohio will be invaluable in continuing to provide our shoppers and donors a friendly and warm experience at Castaways Resale Store.

Doing Good While Looking Good

By shopping at Castaways, you help to raise funds in support of our mission to reunify children with their incarcerated parents, provide at-risk people with employment, and reconcile broken pasts with a new future. We think of this as “Doing Good While Looking Good”, and we are proud of the shopping environment we have created while serving the community.

And we could not have the full and ever-changing inventory in our store without the incredible donations from those that support us. From the latest fashion trends to furniture and holiday decorations, and from sporting equipment to accessories, there is always something new and exciting to discover at Castaways. But did you know that clothing is the donation item that we always need the most?

A Tale of Letting Go

We all do it—we hang on to pieces of clothing, to those golf shoes, or that recipe book that we will never use. And why? In her international bestseller The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, Marie Kondo says, “We should be choosing what we want to keep, not what we want to get rid of”. Her method of organization and purging is based upon the simple principal of holding up a singular article (clothing, gadget, you name it) and asking, “Does this object spark joy?”. Not “Will it ever fit again?” or “Surely I’ll need this…” Does it spark joy?

[Author’s side note: I absolutely admit to keeping clothing because of the memories associated with wearing a certain piece. The dress I wore when my now-husband and I got engaged? Keeping! A sweater hand-knit by my grandmother over ten years ago…can’t get rid of that! I get it. But after being associated with Castaways, I am now able to let go of the clothing because the memories will always be there. End soliloquy.]

 Why Store Stuff When You Can Restore People?

And even with the recent chilly weather in our fair city, spring is just around the corner. That means exchanging boots for open-toed shoes and coats for short-sleeved shirts. Maybe you have to move items from one closet to the other, or even—gasp!—get your kids’ warmer weather clothes out of storage. It’s the time of year that many of us go on a huge organizing spree, whether that is cleaning out the closet or garage.

And when you’re in spring cleaning frenzy, please keep Castaways and our mission in mind. By donating—either your gently used goods or that t-shirt with a hole in it—you can continue to help those we serve and #EndTheCycle. Even if an item of clothing is damaged, we can still recycle it and give it a new life. And if you have two garbage bags worth of clothing to donate, we’ll even come pick it up. Click here to learn more about donating to Castaways. 

Thank you for being a part of the Castaways family. We couldn’t achieve our mission without you!