Category: Recycling

In June 2016, IRN loaded two trailers from the Foothills and Hutchinson Elementary Schools in Jefferson County, Colorado.  IRN’s longtime partner MeTEOR Education is helping Jefferson County with a system-wide furniture upgrade, and when MeTEOR suggested IRN and reuse as a cost-effective alternative to throwing their old furnishings into dumpsters, Jeffco school district administrators readily agreed.  The furnishings – more than 1,600 student and teacher desks, chairs, activity tables, file cabinets, AV carts, and other items – traveled by truck, ship, and then by truck again to the Al-Khansaa School (grades 1-7) in Amman, Jordan.  The Al-Khansaa School, which was almost entirely lacking desks until this shipment arrived, provides educational opportunity to local Jordanian children, and to a large and growing number of children from Syrian refugee families.

If there’s hope in the sad situation in so much of the Middle East, it’s in a generation of children who have a sound education, and who have experienced the fact that human generosity and concern can cross all barriers of language, custom, and distance.  Kudos to MeTEOR Education and Jeffco Schools for helping to make this hope a reality.

http://https://youtu.be/RNkesuKd7Rg

“With IRN, we provide an example of just what we want to show our students – a solution that’s good for the environment, good for society, and good for our budget.”  Matt Cashman, Director of Facilities, Concord (NH) School District

A couple of weeks ago Concord High School and IRN joined forces to send about 150 excess desks, chairs, work tables, library shelves, and other items to our nonprofit partner Food For The Poor in Jamaica.

Like every school, Concord High accumulates excess furnishings.  All the time.  A couple of desks last month.  A few chairs this month.  Some library shelves and book carts next week.  They don’t have any further use in the school, but they’re too good to throw away.  So they end up in storage rooms and basement hallways.  And eventually, they are not a few any more.  They are dozens and dozens, and they’re in the way.

That’s when Concord High calls IRN.

IRN runs a worldwide matchmaking service for surplus furniture.  When an organization like Concord High approaches us with furniture that needs a new home, we reach out to our network of more than 125 nonprofits.  Depending on what’s in the inventory, the best match may be a local Goodwill or a Habitat for Humanity ReStore, a charter or tribal school, or an international charity somewhere on the planet.

Our job doesn’t end when we make the match.  We arrange trucks or tractor-trailers to come to the school, set up a moving crew, and make sure the trucks are packed with as much furniture as they can hold.  Then we lock the doors, and the furnishings are shipped to their recipients across town, across the country, or across the ocean.

The best match at Concord High was Food For The Poor.  When we had it loaded, Concord High’s trailer went over the highway to the port at Elizabeth, NJ, then by container ship to Jamaica, and finally by truck again to FFP’s warehouse in Kingston.  FFP builds and furnishes homes and schools not only in Jamaica, but in more than a dozen other countries, and the shipment from Concord High may ultimately be divided among many communities.

IRN doesn’t get any money from FFP or any of the charities we work with.  We’re paid by the organization that has the surplus.  In almost all cases they pay IRN less than they’d pay a trash company to just throw their old furniture away.

Matt Cashman is Concord’s Director of School Facilities.  He’s come to IRN before, and continues to come back.  “We have furniture that is still useful, but has no place in our school,” he says.  “Before we found IRN, that furniture went into a dumpster.  With IRN, we can provide an example of just what we want to show our students – a solution that’s good for the environment, good for society, and good for our budget.”

 

Please let us know if you have questions or comments, or if you have surplus that needs to find a new home.

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The two political parties need to change, and they need to govern.

The Democrats nominated the ultimate party politician.  They lost.

The Republican nominee was no more a Republican than I am an elephant.  He won.

Most Republicans distanced themselves from their nominee.  They lost.

The signs on people’s lawns telegraphed the story of this election months ago.  Where you saw a Clinton-Kaine sign, it was generally in a line with a half-dozen others, for Senator, Representative, Governor, local Democratic candidates.  Where you saw a Trump sign, you saw a Trump sign.  Rarely a sign for any other candidate.

Trump voters didn’t vote for a Republican; they voted for Trump.  They are sick of politics and our political “leaders”.  They voted for Trump, not as a Republican, but as an anti-Republican, and as an anti-Democrat.  They voted against both political parties.

Millions of anti-Trump citizens are equally sick of politics.  They despised Donald Trump, but they could not stomach the thought of voting for Hillary Clinton and politics as usual.  So they didn’t.

Those who did vote for Hillary were the true Democrats, the people with all those signs on their lawns.  They and most minorities, and a majority of women.  More than voted for Trump, it turns out, but not enough to win an election.

The two political parties need to change, and they need to govern.

Our President-elect is a dangerous buffoon.  Left to his own devices, he will lead our country, perhaps the global community, down, as in downhill, a host of dangerous paths – in domestic policy, financial policy, social policy, foreign policy, environmental policy.  He is a stew of dangerous, destructive ideas.

He was not elected because voters support those ideas.  He was elected because voters are fed up with the two political parties, their politics, and their lack of ideas.  With some individual exceptions, our two parties and their leadership have adopted an ugly, negative, disabling politics.  It’s not a politics that looks forward to issues and their solutions.  It’s a politics that looks backwards and seeks to assign blame.  It’s not a politics that rewards thought and initiative.  It’s a politics that rewards carping and criticism.  It’s not a politics of boldness and honesty.  It’s a politics of backstabbing and spin.  Criticizing is easy; governing is hard.  Governing risks criticism; criticizing promises re-election.  Nothing meaningful gets accomplished in Washington because there is no reward in trying to accomplish anything meaningful; the reward is in dragging down those who do.

People are sick of that.  They are sick of gridlocked, destructive politics, and of the parties and politicians who practice them.  Donald Trump is anti-politics and anti-party.  His ideas may be bad, but at least you know what they are.  The direction in which he wants to lead the country may be stupid and dangerous, but at least it’s a direction.  Unlike our two parties, he has ideas, and he promises motion.

If our two parties continue with politics as they have become, Donald Trump’s bad ideas are going to win out, and that is an awful prospect.  Most of the cards are in the Republicans’ hands.  They can play along with Donald Trump because he represents power and a path to “winning”.  If they do, it’s the American people who will lose.  Or they can work with the Democrats to finds ways past and around Donald Trump’s disastrous ideas.  And the American people will be the winners.

The Democrats can embrace the loser’s role, complaining, nitpicking, and dragging play to a halt.  If they do, the American people will be the real losers.  Or they can embrace good ideas, promote and defend them as good ideas, and work with Republicans to put them in place.  And the American people will be the winners.

There is a huge commonality of tolerance, reasonableness, and common sense in America.  If our two parties can embrace that commonality and govern for the good of the United States and all its people, there is hope that we’ll get through a Donald Trump presidency and emerge stronger and better governed.  If our parties and their leaders keep up their self-mutilating pattern of intolerance, self-serving, deceit, and stagnation, there may be no hope at all.

The election is a message from the American people to our political leaders.  Quit with the arrogance, the fatuous posturing, the back-stabbing and name-calling.  Change.  Govern the country.

Through the end of August, IRN provided 95,282 pieces of furniture and equipment to U.S. and worldwide nonprofits.  These include 42,000 chairs and other seating; 13,000 desks; 10,000 beds and mattresses; 10,000 tables; 4,200 dressers and wardrobes; 4,000 bookcases; plus lighting, appliances, storage cabinets, and thousands of other items.

IRN sourced furnishings from 112 projects with clients in 23 states, with a nearly equal division among colleges and universities, corporations, and elementary-secondary schools.  Just over half of these inventories were distributed to more than 100 U.S. nonprofits in 27 states, including Habitat for Humanity ReStores, Goodwill and St. Vincent de Paul thrift stores, furniture banks, regional and local aid organizations, halfway houses, charter and tribal schools.  The balance were provided to eight international organizations for relief and development projects in 23 countries around the world.

Click here for a downloadable PDF of this summary

Globally and in the U.S., the need for usable furnishings is practically infinite.  IRN doesn’t profit when we provide furnishings to charities; they get the furnishings at no cost.  We charge the generators to make their surplus furniture go away.  We charge less than they’d pay to call in dumpsters, with the assurance that we won’t profit again from their surplus.

The generator comes out ahead; IRN makes a living; and disadvantaged children and families get furniture they desperately need.  In the end, that’s what’s most important.