On the evening of Oct. 5, a few girls from Santa Clara High School’s Girls Basketball Team waited outside their school gym for donated items to be dropped off. Two more future donation drop off times will be held at the same location—Oct. 14 from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. and Oct. 19 from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. These donated items will be brought to a Savers (www.savers.com) location in San Jose to be weighed. Then the thrift store will issue a check to the basketball team. The basketball team will send the money to the athletic department of Texas’s Stafford High School, which was affected by Hurricane Harvey.
“We were originally going to do this fundraiser for our team, but the Central Coast Section (the governing body for our sports teams in our area) sent an email to the athletic directors and asked if we’d be willing to do a fundraiser for an athletic department in Texas that lost everything from Hurricane Harvey,” said DeeDee Kiyota, physical education teacher and girls basketball coach at Santa Clara High School. “They would pair us up with a high school and we got Stafford High School. So we took the fundraiser that we were initially planning for our team and decided to convert it into the fundraiser for Stafford High School.”
According to Kiyota, athletic equipment is not cheap and she was sure that some of the schools in Texas suffered severe losses from Hurricane Harvey.
“For example, if you have 20 teams on campus and you lose all the uniforms, it will cost over $1,000 just to replace the uniforms for one sport,” she said.
Items that are being accepted for donations include bedding and towels, clothing, DVDs and books, electronic items, shoes, kitchen items and sporting goods.
“We ask for donated items to be gently used,” said Randi Knight, area development manager for Savers who is working with the Santa Clara Girls Basketball Team on their fundraiser. “The items are weighed and the money that we give per pound varies depending on the time of year.”
According to Knight, donated items will either be recycled or sold at one of the two San Jose Savers stores.
“We’ve worked with non-profits for over 60 years; over the past two years, the FUNDrive program has provided thousands of organizations in the United States and Canada with a great way to earn money, promote reuse and save the planet,” Knight said. “When there is a catastrophe, the place that had the catastrophe really needs money. They don’t need people to send them items. They don’t have the means to process items. They need money to purchase the things they actually do need. Collecting things is a fun way to do a fundraiser because it’s green and there’s no buying or selling. The fundraisers are asking people to get rid of things they’re going to get rid of anyway.”
For more information about organizing a fundraiser with Savers, contact Knight at (925) 961-7546 or rknight@savers.com.