Joy of Giving month: Residents drive collection campaigns

Two covered parking lots at the entrance of Tower of Adyar Apartment in LB Road, Adyar will be cleared on October 25 to accommodate cartons and bags of gently used clothes, stationery and other usable items. This is the Joy of Giving month and as in the previous years, Aravind Srinivasan has inked in a sheaf of resolutions for himself for this month: attend more phone calls, communicate with various WhatsApp groups and coordinate with people wanting to drop off their gently used items.

A long-time volunteer with the NGO Goonj, this is the second drive for the year that he is coordinating. After people drop their items at the apartment, Aravind would coordinate with the Goonj team to ferry them to their office in Kovilambakkam.

At Madipakkam, George Samuel is the point of contact for all those seeking to give away their surplus materials. A resident of Alacrity Flats, the retired employee from MRF Limited is a donor-turned-volunteer who wanted to put his free time to better use. He stocks items dropped by people in the boot of his car and gets the boot cleared as and when it is filled up.

Likewise, restaurants such as the Viridian Plate in Thiruvanmiyur have made space at their entrance for two cupboards where people can place items.

While Goonj regularly conducts collection drives at different times of the year, this annual exercise in October is more or less fixed in its calendar. It encourages more residents to come forward to volunteer a space in their community to store such items before they are taken to Goonj’s main godown and segregated. The bulk of what they get is clothes, some of which can be used and the rest repurposed into useful products.