For parents of college kids living in a dormitory, the onset of summer brings on the stress of the big move back home. There goes your privacy and quiet solitude, right?
While it will be great to see your young adults again, the process of collecting them and all their … let’s call it junk, shall we? … is daunting. It’s a guerrilla move that involves planning, many executive decisions, and sometimes hand-to-hand combat.
Moving into the college dorm or apartment was fun for everyone. Moving out is not nearly so exciting.
For most students, moving back home for the summer (or graduating and moving out of the house!) means they no longer have a use for the things they’ve accumulated over the school year, such as dorm room furniture, electronics, books, and clothing. Often, these perfectly reusable items end up in campus dumpsters or in the trash once the student moves home, where they may take years to break down fully.
Let’s face it. Moving things to and from school that they never touch is wasted energy. It is tempting for your kid to just blindly put it all in the car. Don’t allow it!
Instead of tossing these gently-used dorm room supplies in the dumpster, what if there was a better solution? There is — donate them to Goodwill Central Coast.
Once Goodwill receives and processes your generously donated items, they are ready to be sold in our network of retail stores or online at shopgoodwill.com. The revenue generated from the resale of these donated items helps fund Goodwill Central Coast’s job training and employment services for community members to gain the pride that comes with self-sufficiency. Plus, by ditching the dumpster and donating to Goodwill instead, you’re doing your part to keep reusable or recyclable items from filling local landfills, keeping our communities clean, and reducing the impact of waste on the environment.
Here are some handy campus move-out donation tips:
- As you clean out the dorm room or apartment, separate the belongings into three piles: one pile for the things you want to take home, a second pile for the gently-used items you don’t need anymore, and a third pile for trash (anything that can’t be reused by someone else).
- Place the items from the second pile into a cardboard box, plastic bin, or bag and load it into your vehicle. Be sure to mark any containers with breakable items as “FRAGILE” to prevent damage during transit.
- Drop off the donations at your nearest Goodwill Central Coast donation center or store. We’ll take it from there!
As you can see, donating to GCC is a small act with a big impact! Just by dropping off the items, you don’t need anymore, you’re making a significant difference in your community and for the planet.
The good news? You are going to move out far quicker than you moved in. The bad news, it’s not always pretty. Yet parents everywhere have found along with the chaos, the filth, and the logistics, these are wonderful days spent alongside their near adults — and they wouldn’t trade that experience for anything.
