Since 2002 IRN has provided more than 5,200 trailers and shipping containers filled with furnishings and equipment to nonprofit organizations working in 52 countries around the world, and in 47 U.S. states. To the nearly 150 charitable organizations who have been our partners, we thank you for making our work possible.
Word about IRN is spreading among colleges and universities, corporations, and K-12 schools and districts who have excess furnishings and want a better option than throwing them away. As a result we have a growing supply of very good quality furnishings suitable for homes, clinics, orphanages, libraries and schools. These are available to IRN’s charitable partners at no cost other than transportation from our project site to your location. If you have not worked with IRN before, please get in touch, and let us start supplying your needs.
We’re not IT wizards, very far from it. But we try. We have a new electronic wish-list for our charitable partners at http://irnsurplus.com/recipients-wishlist.html. Please take a look, and if you haven’t done so already, please take two or three minutes to fill it out. That will give us a good idea what kinds of projects are best suited to your needs, so we can reach you when we have a good match (and not bug you with unsuitable projects).
In 2015 IRN provided more than 600 tractor-trailer-loads of furnishings to nonprofit organizations in 26 US States and 29 countries around the world. In 2016 we’re on track to far surpass that total.
How do we get there? What is it that IRN actually does?
Here’s a day in our life: May 27, 2016.
On May 27 we handled six projects in four states: Massachusetts, New Jersey, and two each in Illinois and New Mexico. Three were at colleges, one a corporation, one an elementary school, and one a high school. Two were one-day projects; the others were part of projects that extended over several days, or in one case several weeks.
Two college projects shipped mixed dormitory furniture, one consisted entirely of dormitory mattresses. The corporation provided a mixture of professional office seating, tables, desks, and storage. The elementary and high schools provided a mix of classroom, administrative, science, and library furnishings. These project filled a total of eighteen trailers on May 27, including eight 40-foot overseas shipping containers and ten 53-foot trailers for domestic recipients.
Long before the projects started, we had matched their inventories with nonprofit partners, and set up trucks and trailers to arrive at our six sites. The shipments on May 27 were provided to four different charities, and ultimately shipped to seven locations: two truckloads to a tribal school in Utah, one truckload each to independent schools in Kentucky and Pennsylvania, six to Habitat for Humanity locations in Indiana; three shipping containers of mattresses to communities in Haiti; one shipping container to a school in Haiti; and four overseas containers to schools in El Salvador.
What is it they got? By the end of the day on May 27, IRN had packed and shipped a total of 3,463 pieces of furniture, including nearly 1,000 student and administrative desks, 250 work and activity tables, more than 900 chairs, over 250 bookcases and storage cabinets, 228 beds, and nearly 600 mattresses.
All kept out of US landfills. Our clients, the schools and the company that generated the surplus, saved money, and did the right thing for the environment and the society of which we are all part.
All on their way to a second life in communities where buying new is not an option. Our charitable partners got thousands of good-quality furnishings to support their social and humanitarian missions, for nothing more than the cost of transportation.
May 27, 2016. A busy day. A typical day in May for IRN. A good day.
Boston UniversityCorporation, ChicagoUniversity of IllinoisLas Cruces High SchoolRutgers UniversityPicacho Elem. School, Las Cruces NM
I love my Mom, and if you know my Mom you will know why. She is 94 and lives with me. She lived on her own until three years ago, but then she gave up her driver’s license and started to get lonely and sad. So without really telling her I moved her: first herself, then her bedroom, then the rest of her stuff, and here she is.
But this isn’t a story about my Mom; it’s a story about Moms.
Because now I get to be a Mom to my Mom. And being a Mom is something else.
Here is what you get to do, if you’re a Mom:
You prepare three meals every day. You make sure they’re healthy and nutritious. You make sure they’re interesting and not repetitive. You plan ahead and go shopping. If you’re not going to be home for a meal, you prepare and leave something ready, or leave instructions and ingredients for the daycare lady.
You wash dishes. You prepare food in clean pots, and then they’re dirty pots. You serve food on clean plates, and then they’re dirty plates. You wash them, dry them, put them away, take them out one meal later and start over. Over and over and over, day after day after day.
You clean a house. You vacuum. You dust. You clean sinks and toilets. And then someone tracks in some more grit, and someone leaves a soap ring in the bathroom. And so you start over. Like meals and dishes, these jobs do not end. You do them over and over and over. They are not rewarding.
You wash clothes. And sheets and pillowcases, and towels and washcloths. Then you fold them, and put them away. People get them dirty, so you do it again. And again. And again. You make the doctor’s and dentist’s and hairdresser’s appointments, and make sure people get there. Again and again and again. You make sure there’s money in the bank, and pay the bills.
You don’t get any sick days. You can have a horrible cold, or the flu, or a broken leg, but being a Mom doesn’t go away. Those people who rely on you, they still rely on you, and they are lost without you. You can have one foot in the grave, but the other will be pushing the vacuum cleaner or going to the store.
You are always on your game. If someone is down, you find a way to make them laugh. If someone is sick, you find a way to make them feel better. If someone needs to talk, you listen. If someone needs company, you talk. You don’t get to have a bad day, because someone else is relying on you to make their day good. You don’t get to show anger, or frustration, or impatience. You are the rock on which all waves break.
You compromise your career. You tell your boss, I cannot make that meeting, I don’t have coverage; I cannot make that trip, I can’t be away. You arrive at work later, and you leave earlier. You try to do work at home, but then someone at home needs your attention, and they come first. Other people at work – the young kids, the single people, the 99% of men who are not Moms – their careers stay on fast track. Yours stagnates.
My own Mom gave up 25 years of her life, and her career, to be a Mom. She was on course to be one of the first women executives at Time, when Time was one of the most powerful companies in America. She chucked that, to cook, and wash dishes, and clean the house, and do the shopping, and make the doctor’s appointments, and wash the underwear. To be a Mom.
I have learned many things, being a Mom to my Mom.
I have learned that being a Mom is the most frustrating, boring, stupid, repetitive, tedious, day-to-day the least rewarding thing I have ever done.
I have learned that being a Mom to someone I love is the most interesting, satisfying, valuable, by far the most necessary and rewarding thing I have ever done.
I have learned that Moms – not me, but real Moms, to real kids – are the most the most generous, loving, caring, thoughtful, capable, the most fantastic people in the world.
To my Mom – Patty – and to all Moms on Mother’s Day: Thank you, you are the best.
Sunset over the Catskills. Taconic State Parkway, New York
I recently had the good fortune to travel a stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway through Virginia. If you have never driven the Blue Ridge Parkway, you should. It is one of the two or three most beautiful roads I have ever seen. Drive the Parkway in the spring, if you can, before the leaves come out. Then it’s like, well, it’s like winning a trifecta. You get long views over the mountains and foothills; you get the first blushes of green clothing the mountainsides; and you get incomparable bursts of white and pink and red in the fruit trees and dogwoods and azaleas. You also get this most beautiful road in America all to yourself – you can drive for miles and miles without seeing another car or person.
Returning to New Hampshire from another recent trip, I had the equally good fortune to drive the Taconic Parkway up the Hudson River. The Hudson River Valley doesn’t have the grand mountains and long views of the Blue Ridge, but is just as beautiful in its own way. You wind up, down and through hillsides of orchards and woods and pasture for a hundred miles, with occasional views west to the Catskill Mountains, 40 miles away. This is Rip van Winkle country, for all the world little changed since his time.
On that trip I was coming back from New Jersey, where I was doing a project to send desks and chairs and dorm furniture to disadvantaged kids and families. I love what I do, what we at IRN get to do. We get to keep usable stuff out of the “waste stream” and get that stuff to people who need it, often desperately. That’s fun and rewarding – a good thing to be doing.
But what I was reminded, driving through those beautiful landscapes, is that what we do is not really about reuse. It’s not really about furniture, it’s not really about the “waste stream”, it’s not really about the folks we get to help. It’s about this beautiful rich country of ours, and this one-of-a-kind planet.
Reuse, recycling, waste reduction: they are about a way to live on this planet. They are about a carry-in, carry-out policy toward Planet Earth. They are about touching the Earth in our lives in a way that leaves it for others to enjoy after us.
The Blue Ridge wasn’t always the Blue Ridge. There was a time when it was logged and scraped bare, when it was a landscape of tree stumps and tangled, rotting brush. The beautiful Blue Ridge is all second growth; it is a landscape recovered from exploitation.
A mountaintop “mine” in West Virginia. One of hundreds.
And we’re still exploiting, at a massive scale, with more destruction than ever. Just a few miles west of the Blue Ridge, almost within sight of the Parkway, you will find dozens or hundreds of new stumps, not of trees but of whole mountains, mountains that have been scraped off and shoved into the valleys next door to reach a seam of coal a few feet thick. “Mountaintop removal mining.” Google some photos; they’re gross. There are hundreds of square miles of these dead stumps of mountains, and of valleys filled with debris. A little further north in Pennsylvania, there are whole landscapes made toxic by mine tailings. Where I traveled in New Jersey, there are poisoned Superfund sites that are and will remain fenced against entry, forever.
That’s why what we do is important. Reuse, recycling, intelligent use of resources – they make it possible to have and enjoy landscapes like the Blue Ridge. Careless use of resources – that ends up in mountaintop removal. Reuse and recycling make it possible to have and enjoy landscapes like the Hudson Valley. Careless use of resources produces poison mine dumps and Superfund sites.
In the end it’s not about the furniture, it’s about the landscapes. It’s about using resources in a way that lets us preserve landscapes for others to enjoy after us. It’s about using resources in a way that lets our children and grandchildren enjoy the Earth as we have. It’s about demonstrating the possibility of producing lasting wealth without destruction. The Earth provides plenty of resources for us to do that, if we use the resources wisely.
We collect furniture, and send it to people who need it. In the end, not for them, nor for ourselves, but for this beautiful rich country of ours, and this one-of-a-kind planet.
