Have you heard of Savers (Value Village)? If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a popular thrift store here in the Pacific Northwest, with locations throughout the world. In their own words:

The Savers family of stores is a for-profit, global thrift retailer offering great quality, gently used clothing, accessories and household goods. Our business model of purchasing, reselling and recycling gives communities a smart way to shop and keeps more than 650 million pounds of used goods from landfills each year. We also help more than 120 nonprofit organizations by paying them for donated goods, which supports their vital community programs and services. Our brands comprise Savers (in the U.S), Value Village (in the U.S. and Canada), Unique (in the U.S.), Village des Valeurs (in Quebec) and Savers Australia. All in all, we operate over 330 locations and have 22,000 employees. (source)

Savers was founded in San Francisco, California, in 1954, operating out of an old movie theater. They began to partner with local non-profits to fund social programs. their efforts helped children, the disabled, the diseased, and the down-on-their-luck. Today they operate over 300 stores across the United States, Canada, and Australia.

Here’s a timeline of the company’s history:

As you can see from the timeline, Savers has achieved much in the past 60 years. And we look forward to seeing the good they will continue to do.

You can support the work they do by donating your gently used clothing, used shoes, linens, and household goods to a Savers near you. Your donations will be sorted and sold in local stores, where they will help others twice over: The first will be for the person who purchases your donations. The second will less direct. As we mentioned earlier, Savers uses a portion of its proceeds to fund social programs which means that a portion of the proceeds from your donation will contribute to helping others! If that’s not a reason to donate your used goods, we don’t know what is!