Sharing, Caring, Reusing. Repeat.

Imagine that you are a school teacher or a non-profit, and you rarely have the budget for school supplies or office equipment.

 

Suppose you own a business that either is relocating, or you have excess inventory for which you see no other choice but disposal.

 

Finally, you are the administrator in City Hall struggling with rapidly-filling landfills.

 

 

On Riverside Drive, at the edge of Griffith Park, stands a former warehouse where teachers and non-profit organizations' employees await an opportunity unique to Los Angeles.  I happened to visit last Wednesday afternoon, where about 30 teachers patiently waited.  Each of them sported a sticker--one of four colors.  Every 5 minutes or so, someone would walk out, call a color, and the teachers would line up, slowly file through a door, and was then handled a clipboard.

 

What followed was amazing.  Welcome to LA SHARES. 

 

Boxes of binders stacked to the ceiling.  Envelopes.  Printer labels.  Reams of papers.  Pens, pencils, erasures.  Staplers, 3-hole punches.  I even saw cleaning and beauty products.  And piles of construction paper and art supplies.

 

These teachers were spending the afternoon at LA SHARES, a non-profit materials reuse program.  LA SHARES works with businesses to obtain new and used office supplies and other materials, and then distributes them to schools and non-profits that desperately need them.  While serving the needs of the community, LA SHARES is also a great demonstration of inventory control and database management.  And while recycling should just be a natural reflex of ours, remember that recycling involves hauling and reprocessing materials--which involves energy consumption.  Rather than sending such materials downstream, why not move unwanted goods upstream and let someone who needs them use them?

Here's how LA SHARES works:  A school or non-profit visits the agency's web site and creates an online profile.  Once LA SHARES vets and registers them, the organizations can outline a wish list and their "top 20 needs."  LA SHARES' staff matches their needs to what businesses have donated, and through its customized database, the agency strives to match its inventory with what various schools and non-profits have requested. 

 

Where the real magic happens is when LA SHARES distributes big ticket items such as shelves, video systems, and furniture.  As such items roll in, LA SHARES' staff matches them to the organizations' various requests.  Registered organizations can then view these items on LA SHARES' web site, view the dimensions, know how many people are needed to haul the items away, what size of car or truck is critical for transporting the items, and where the items are located. 

 

LA SHARES is a win-win proposition all the way around.  Businesses don't have to deal with bulk trash fees, and can gain a tax write off.  The City of Los Angeles has less trash going to its landfills.  And teachers and non-profit administrators have access to quality materials.  While LA SHARES says it accepts new and used items, 99% of what I saw in its Griffith Park Reuse Center looked new to me--and many of those items are expensive at art supply stores and office superstores. 

The teachers with whom I spoke on Wednesday were wide-eyed, beaming, and thrilled.  With budget cuts hammering the schools, teachers often pay for supplies out of their own pockets--yet many of them don't quite spend enough to get any tax break from the IRS.  They kept telling me, "I'm amazed," "This is overwhelming," "I didn't expect this," "How come I didn't know about this."  They followed the simple rules:  respect the maximum amount of each item that can be taken, list them on a clipboard so LA SHARES' staff can manage its inventory, and write a thank you note to the donors.  Teachers could take as much as they want . . . and as the minutes passed, the piles outside kept mounting.