Saturday 2nd May 2020
Report written by Peter Van Tongeren
The Corner House supports various projects, including Feed the Streets, project Malachi, Magpie project, Lola's Homeless and many more.
To support them, a cloth's donation point was installed at the gates of the local rugby club, Bancroft, by a team calling themselves Chunks2Hunks. Initially the target was to collect men's clothing, for project Malachi, but that soon expanded into more projects, due to the sheer volume of donations received.
After reports of overflowing bins, Dan & myself dashed down to clear the bins out and put the clothing away safely. With the rain recently, some of the bags had gotten wet... and not all of them were completely water-proof, so there was some damp clothing...
Checking a couple of bin bags for dampness soon snowballed into taking everything received in the last two weeks out into the sunbathed patio for drying out & sorting into different categories. The pile of bags inside just didn't seem to go down, more and more kept coming out. Besides the mens clothing we were looking for, there were piles of ladies wear, kids clothing and a surprisingly big pile of baby stuff - personal favourite was the little halloween dress!
After over 4 hours of drying & sorting, 12 shiny new bins and a large laundry bag were filled with sorted clothing & shoes, 2 more large bags still awaiting checking. Next step is contacting the different charities to see exactly what kind of items they need most, to then pack them a bag or bin and drop it off. More connections are being made already, places like Great Ormond Street Hospital might be a perfect place for some of the kids & baby stuff, for example, but we are always open for more suggestions, preferbly locally.
Note to self - next time bring along some sunscreen....