Una Vida Community Closet

I first got involved in Una Vida when I retired in 2020. I began noticing posts from Lynne Gordon Moquete on Facebook, asking for donations for her food closet, which she ran out of her garage at home. I learned that she also made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for her students, as she was a teacher at Casa Grande High School. As Covid progressed and the number of food insecure families in Petaluma increased, Lynne ramped up her food distribution, finding space at local churches and building ways to secure more food. I don't know all the details, and while I volunteered with the food distribution for several years, that is not the subject of this blog, so I won't go into it further.

Today I wanted to write about the process of distributing clothing. While volunteering for food distribution, I heard about the clothing distributions that Lynne organized, and I participated in those for several years. The process that was used was a HUGE amount of work, so I want to talk about that, and then will get to the current way that clothes are distributed, which is the Community Closet.

Periodically (once a year when I volunteered), Lynne would set up a clothing distribution at a local church, and start gathering clothes. They were usually gathered for 6-8 weeks, often during the summer. The first year I only got involved at the tail end, when the donated bags of clothes were sorted according to size and gender on a volunteer's driveway, and then transported to the church for distribution the next day. That was a ton of work, but highly organized, and seemed to go very well.

Una Vida donated clothing ready to give away

To give you an idea of the sheer volume of clothes that were being processed, here are pictures from a variety of years. Imagine how much work was involved in these efforts. If you consider the time from donation to a recipient picking up the donated item at a giveaway, the clothes were touched a total of 6 times! Due to the hard work of volunteers, and the generosity of Petaluma residents, thousands of bags of clothes were given away.

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In later years, I was more involved in the beginning stages of the process, and it went something like this:

• The clothing donations were requested, and the address where they were to be dropped off was the home of a very experienced Una Vida volunteer. She and her husband would do a preliminary sort, getting rid of all the "garbage" (torn or stained clothes, or items that weren't clothes), and sorting by child vs. adult sizes. At the time I was involved, once she was done, volunteers would pick up the clothes from her home and transport them to their home or the garbage, depending on the results of that preliminary sorting.

• The volunteers would then sort more finely by gender and size at home. This was the process that was done on the volunteer's driveway the first year, but now spaced out over time and locations. There was a team of volunteers performing this sort, at the time I was involved it was 5-6 people. Every few days someone would pick up clothes and transport them, as there was a HUGE amount of donations and the couple that did the preliminary sorting were very proficient.

Sorted clothes at home

• As a volunteer involved in that process, I would set up a couple of tables in the garage, unload the bags and sort them into sizes and genders, then re-pack and label white garbage bags (so you could write on them), tying them with the "non-profit knot" (one handle in a loop so they could easily be untied). Sometimes there were more stained or torn clothing to sort out, or you would get odd items like baby blankets or costumes that required special sorting. I would also try to "save up" until I had a full bag of a particular size, so it took up space in the garage for several weeks.

• After we were done sorting, we would take the clothes to a storage unit. Often that was sheds on the church property, but sometimes it was a storage space in town. At this point the clothes had been touched and transported three times!

• The day before the clothing distribution, the clothes would be transported to the space they were to be given out (it was usually not the same location), and organized on tarps on the ground. This was not as simple as it sounds, since you don't know ahead of time how many clothes you will have of a particular size and gender, and if you guessed wrong you ended up re-moving the clothes. People in Petaluma were very generous, so there were usually TONS of clothes, and it was actually a problem to lay them all out, even if there was a huge lawn or parking lot to work with.

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• Of particular challenge were the shoes. In the preliminary processing, shoes were tied or bundled together with rubberbands, but when we laid them out we also wanted to sort them by size. I don't know if you've ever tried to look inside a shoe to determine the size, but it's hard enough on a new shoe, let alone one that has been worn. And again the amount of space needed for different sizes had to be adjusted as we laid them out. One of the volunteers started doing a preliminary storage into bins by size when she sorted, and that helped a LOT.

  
  
  
  
  
  

• We also had a volunteer who was a retired preschool teacher, and she would gather books throughout the year and we would distribute them alongside the clothing.  She did the majority of work in sorting and organizing the books, and on the day of the event would get help moving them from her car to the designated tables.  I think the kids had even more fun collecting free books than they did clothes.

Books for all ages

• The clothing distribution was open for 3-4 hours, then the leftover clothes needed to be removed from the premises since we were operating on borrowed property.   What was surprising to me was the VOLUME of leftovers.  I estimate that 1/3/-1/2 of the clothes were leftover, so it took a lot of muscle to reload those and transport them. 

  
  

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• One year, on a particularly hot August day, despite our best efforts to organize a recipient ahead of time (Goodwill in Petaluma), when we got there with ½ a UHaul truck of clothes they could not take them because they didn’t have space.   Since the UHaul was due to be returned, that was a problem.  They were gracious enough to call around to other Goodwill stores in the area, and made arrangements for the Santa Rosa store to take them.  A memorable trip up the highway with Kathy, another volunteer driving and me navigating, led us to the correct store, but it was late enough that they didn’t have enough staff to process the clothes, so they asked us to come back THE NEXT DAY!  Talk about stressful,  But it worked out.

  
  

That experience was partly what led to my initiation of the idea for the Community Closet.  About that time, our church’s outreach team decided that they would no longer do an annual rummage sale, so the two rooms that we were using for rummage storage became available.  Our church, the Petaluma United Methodist Church, was already renting space to other local non-profits, and as part of trustees I had worked on the agreements for these arrangements, so with permission of trustees and church council I offered the two rooms to Una Vida.  At the time, I thought they would use them for clothing storage, and use the church lawn for a periodic clothing giveaway.  We did a giveaway that way one year, but after that the community closet was born!

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Lynne’s idea was to offer clothing in a boutique style location, with clothing carefully curated and neatly hung.  To avoid the “thrift store smell”, Lynne organized a washing brigade, and all donations were sorted and washed.  If clothes had the least little stain or “pilling”, or were inappropriate in other ways (company logo, sports team, etc.) they were out-sorted and re-donated.  What Lynne wanted was a shopping experience that recipients might experience if they were shopping at a regular retail store, but with everything for free.

First, she wanted the environment to be a pleasant one.  With the help of a few volunteers, she had the rooms painted and decorated, and flooring installed.   What’s amazing is that she was able to do this nearly cost-free, because her connections included students she had in her time at Casa Grande that now owned small businesses of their own, including a painter and a flooring company.  With the acquisition of furniture and clothing racks, and with the help of a volunteer who installed wallpaper and with my (limited) sewing skills to make curtains, the two rooms were transformed.   A variety of clothing racks were hung or installed, making the most of the small space.  One room was to be used for adult clothing, and the second for kid’s clothing.  Shoes and accessories were included, making the shopping experience yield everything one could need to cloth oneself or one’s family.

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Not only was the environment made pretty, but Lynne’s organizational skills and vision went beyond the environment.  For instance, rather than use any old clothing hangers, Lynne wanted them to be the same, and so adult size hangers were acquired, along with size indicators that could go around the top of the hanger.  Volunteers were taught to hang the item so that the hanger consistently pointed the same direction, making it easy for shoppers to quickly find and assess each item.

Over time, the process of displaying items has changed, as volunteers learned and Lynne’s vision grew.  For instance, pants were initially displayed folded on a set of shelves.  This was partly due to the availability of racks of a certain size and shape, and partly because you could store a lot of pants that way.  The challenge was that it is difficult to indicate the size of the pants.  Initially, the shelves were marked and the size was put on tape on the pants, but then they have to be folded so that tape showed.  As shoppers shopped for pants, they would not be refolded with the tape showing, or they would be replaced on the wrong spot on the shelves.  This necessitated a lot of work and re-work on the part of volunteers, and a less than optimal shopping experience.  With the installation of a new set of hanging racks, and a better type of hanger, there is now a much better system. 

The new solution for pants

One of the many great things that have evolved from the Community Closet is a new partnership between Una Vida and an organization called Just Between Friends.  Just Between Friends is a franchise of consignment sales of kid’s clothes, shoes, toys, books, and furniture, and they get a HUGE amount of items to sell.  As a consignor, you can choose to donate your leftover unsold items or pick them up at the end of the sale.  When I was consigning 15 years ago, I just wanted the things gone, so I chose to donate them, and many current consignors do the same.  The young woman that owns the North Bay franchise was willing to let Una Vida have some of the leftover donated clothing, and for the last year this has resulted in a huge influx of kid’s items, in addition to donations from local families.  Since there are more than one Just Between Friends franchises, Lynne has arranged to pick up items throughout the year in different locations, creating an ongoing influx of clothes in all sizes.  We have even gotten to the point where we can specify which sizes we need and volunteers can “shop” for those things specifically when picking up donated items.  This is a whole process in itself, but probably needs to wait for another day to get into detail. In the meantime, the kid's room is fairly full of donations from private parties as well as JBF. What a help for parents, as we all know that kids grow fast! I've learned that donated toys are really good for keeping the kids distracted while parents are shopping.

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One of the things we learned is that we need more space than that used to display clothes for shoppers. The amount of work that goes into sorting and processing clothes, not to mention storing clothes when there are extra donations, required another room. Luckily, there was a large room that was no longer needed by trustees that filled the bill, and volunteers work there regularly to keep donations ready to go! There is definitely a lot of work to keep this going, more than most people realize.

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Today, the Community Closet is in full swing.  When I volunteer, I observe not only shoppers who find items they need for themselves or their children, but I see volunteers who work together in community, I see community members who are able to find outlets for their unwanted items, and I see the church property being put to good use, providing a place for this valuable service to be offered.   While the prior process worked as a good way to distribute clothes to those who needed them, the Community Closet is a more pleasant experience for volunteers and shoppers, and is able to provide clothes on a continuous basis throughout the year. Thank goodness for Una Vida, Lynne's vision, and the hard work of volunteers that are making this happen!