Eternal Swap continues: phase two, setting up the Winter Clothing free shop

Exciting day! We have set up the bones of a new Winter Clothing Free Shop in a TDSB middle school. The school has 100+ students who belong to families living in a refugee settlement shelter, and for many this is their first winter, so we are doing some neighbourhood cross pollination.

The school hosting the Free Shop was identified through a friend, the settlement worker at our kids' former elementary school, Mehrraz. She loved the Winter Freecycle we had at our elementary school (started by WIP members in 2013) and the amazing community support we had with our rummage sales/swaps over the years following, and noticed that not all the schools she worked at had this.  The Free Shop school hosts don't have the same kind of parent support but they have enthusiastic staff and students. The staff got so excited about the idea of the free shop that they solicited donations from staff before we arrived and got student ambassadors to set up this fabulous space in the former library at the school! (Don't worry, they have a bigger better library now)

Our contribution: You can overthink this whole donation redirection thing, so we are trying to keep it simple. We started a clothing drive at our former school, and took the clothes donated so far, plus last year's lost and found remains, my son's outgrown jacket and a bunch of signs and went out to meet our contacts to set up a Winter Clothing Free shop- the rest of the donations going forward will be part of swaps on the 5th and 12th in the donor community, with the good quality remains post swap donated here.

We also brought experience and signs, along with donations and suggestions. Those kids are, frankly, much better at folding than we are, so we sorted out shopping zones, and added our donations- it is amazing what you can get done in half an hour. They are planning some shopping "events" over the next couple of weeks and we will revisit the space after the 14th of December. We left them with a T-shirt bag sample, they can make more for shoppers.

They will need more adult sized winter gear but this is a good start and looks great.