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conuly
One about how recessions, paradoxically, spur people to give more money
In Downturn, an Upside: Generosity
By SUSAN DOMINUS
Recession got you down? Look on the bright side — it’s not a crisis, it’s a crisatunity!
That suspiciously upbeat word mash-up has become a term of art for political organizers, who usually use it in the context of e-mail messaging techniques. When such organizers try to raise awareness about a big problem — say, global poverty — they are talking about a crisis, which can evoke ennui and helplessness.
But if they can outline specific action to address a slice of the problem — sign this petition today that will embarrass this foreign government into resolving this human rights abuse! — then they’ve got themselves a crisatunity (pronounced CRY-sa-too-nitty). A crisis, but an opportunity!
Many social service agencies in New York stepped into December with every reason to think they would face another garden-variety crisis of the Great Recession — scant resources with which to brighten the holidays for children. “We had no idea where things were going to come from,” said Terry Troia, executive director of Project Hospitality, an interfaith organization that serves the hungry and homeless on Staten Island.
But crisatunity struck — even without a campaign of alarming and action-inspiring e-mail messages. As Christmas approached, new toys flooded into Project Hospitality from unusual places, including a correctional facility whose staff that sponsored a drive. “It was a banner year,” said Ms. Troia, “and the majority of gifts that poured out were from people we’d never met before.”
The same phenomenon bowled over Carolyn McLaughlin, executive director of BronxWorks, a community and social-service center that used to be called the Citizens Advice Bureau. Ms. McLaughlin estimated that she had 25 new donors providing gifts to 1,000 South Bronx children. Some of those did not exactly fit the typical local-business or corporate sponsor profile — there was a woman who had once lived at the agency’s shelter, and a motorcycle club called the Legion of Doom. The gifts were also more lavish than usual — “things like electric guitars and Easy-Bake ovens and brand new bicycles,” Ms. McLaughlin said.
Reports of similar bounty came in from Goddard Riverside Community Center, on the Upper West Side, Hudson Guild, a settlement house based in Chelsea, and the Supportive Children’s Advocacy Network, which serves East Harlem.
ADD it to the list of upsides of the downturn: A raised awareness of hardship can spur people to help. Abortion-rights groups, which see contributions rise when their opponents are in power, have long known about crisatunity, even if they didn’t call it that. This holiday season, some New York groups found they had to do less to get more, even from people who had less to give.
“It’s rough out there,” said Noel Andujar of Legions of Doom, who organized about 30 members to give toys to BronxWorks’ Positive Living, a service for families with a member who is H.I.V. positive. “A lot of the guys in the group are laid off, but they managed to pull through and give a toy.”
Ben Brandzel, who spearheaded many of MoveOn.org’s e-mail campaigns, first started using the term “crisatunity” in 2007, while describing the anatomy of effective organizing e-mail to other campaigns. “The heart of the concept is that in the same moment, you take in the scope of the problem and your ability to change it for the better,” he said.
He could imagine that if some of the energy channeled toward opposing President Bush’s policies could be strategically refocused, in this economy, toward service and charitable giving. And if he is right, what better way than through campaigns that emphasize both the depths of a specific local crisis, and the immediate effectiveness of giving (or volunteering) year-round, not just at Christmas?
But Mr. Brandzel did not coin the term, which reeks of millennial corporatespeak; for that, we have to thank the great lexicographer (and spoofer of millennial corporatespeak), Homer Simpson. In an old episode of the show, Lisa points out to her father that the Chinese use the same word for both crisis and opportunity. Homer replies, “Yes! Crisatunity!”
For better or for worse, 2010 will surely have plenty of it.
One about the clothing stores that destroy unsold goods before tossing them. Ugh.
A Clothing Clearance Where More Than Just the Prices Have Been Slashed
By JIM DWYER
In the bitter cold on Monday night, a man and woman picked apart a pyramid of clear trash bags, the discards of the HM clothing store that reigns in blazing plate-glass glory on 34th Street, just east of Sixth Avenue in Manhattan.
At the back entrance on 35th Street, awaiting trash haulers, were bags of garments that appear to have never been worn. And to make sure that they never would be worn or sold, someone had slashed most of them with box cutters or razors, a familiar sight outside H & M’s back door. The man and woman were there to salvage what had not been destroyed.
He worked quickly, never uttering a word. A bag was opened and eyed, and if it held something of promise, was tossed at the feet of the woman. She said her name was Pepa.
Were the clothes usually cut up before they were thrown out?
“A veces,” she said in Spanish. Sometimes.
She packed up a few items that had escaped the blade — a bright green T-shirt that said “Summer of Surf,” and a dark-blue hoodie in size 12, with a Divided label. The rest was returned to the pyramid.
It is winter. A third of the city is poor. And unworn clothing is being destroyed nightly.
A few doors down on 35th Street, hundreds of garments tagged for sale in Wal-Mart — hoodies and T-shirts and pants — were discovered in trash bags the week before Christmas, apparently dumped by a contractor for Wal-Mart that has space on the block.
Each piece of clothing had holes punched through it by a machine.
They were found by Cynthia Magnus, who attends classes at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York on Fifth Avenue and noticed the piles of discarded clothing as she walked to the subway station in Herald Square. She was aghast at the waste, and dragged some of the bags home to Brooklyn, hoping that someone would be willing to take on the job of patching the clothes and making them wearable.
A Wal-Mart spokeswoman, Melissa Hill, said the company normally donates all its unworn goods to charities, and would have to investigate why the items found on 35th Street were discarded.
During her walks down 35th Street, Ms. Magnus said, it is more common to find destroyed clothing in the H & M trash. On Dec. 7, during an early cold snap, she said, she saw about 20 bags filled with H & M clothing that had been cut up.
“Gloves with the fingers cut off,” Ms. Magnus said, reciting the inventory of ruined items. “Warm socks. Cute patent leather Mary Jane school shoes, maybe for fourth graders, with the instep cut up with a scissor. Men’s jackets, slashed across the body and the arms. The puffy fiber fill was coming out in big white cotton balls.” The jackets were tagged $59, $79 and $129.
This week, a manager in the H & M store on 34th Street said inquiries about its disposal practices had to be made to its United States headquarters. However, various officials did not respond to 10 inquiries made Tuesday by phone and e-mail.
Directly around the corner from H & M is a big collection point for New York Cares, which conducts an annual coat drive.
“We’d be glad to take unworn coats, and companies often send them to us,” said Colleen Farrell, a spokeswoman for New York Cares.
More than coats were tossed out. “The H & M thing was just ridiculous, not only clothing, but bags and bags of sturdy plastic hangers,” Ms. Magnus said. “I took a dozen of them. A girl can never have enough hangers.”
H & M, which is based in Sweden, has an executive in charge of corporate responsibility who leads the company’s sustainability efforts. On its Web site, H&M reports that to save paper, it has shrunk its shipping labels.
“How about all the solid waste generated by throwing away usable garments and plastic hangers?” Ms. Magnus asked in a letter to the executive, Ingrid Schullstrom. She volunteered to help H & M connect with a charity or agency in New York that could put the unsold items to better use than simply tossing them in the trash. So far, she said, she has gotten no response.
On Monday night, Pepa’s shopping bag held a few items. She pointed to her gray sweatpants. “From here,” she said.
How about coats?
“Maybe tomorrow,” she said.
And a follow-up, of sorts, of where they could send those clothes instead - kinda like the food bank, but for clothes.
Where Unsold Clothes Meet People in Need
By JIM DWYER
Good ideas have legs. One day in 1985, Suzanne Davis asked a friend, Larry Phillips, the president of the Phillips-Van Heusen clothing line, if his company had any excess inventory that could be used by homeless men. A few days later, Mr. Phillips sent 100 boxes of windbreakers to a shelter on the Bowery.
Then he nudged friends, and 750 London Fog trench coats arrived, followed by crates of Jockey underwear. “All this merchandise they weren’t going to sell, so what were they going to do with it?” Ms. Davis recalled.
A few years earlier, City Harvest had been created to rescue edible food that was going to be destroyed; separately, the Food Bank for New York City was established to collect and organize food for distribution.
Inspired by these projects, Ms. Davis, then director of the J.M. Kaplan Fund, organized the New York Clothing Bank to recover unworn garments. It opened in 1986 in a city office on Church Street, and now occupies a 20,000-square-foot warehouse in the Brooklyn Army Terminal. An executive from J. C. Penney helped set up the inventory system. Retailers and manufacturers donate goods worth $10 million annually. With a paid staff of three, the bank gives clothing to 250 aid groups, which help 80,000 people.
Stacked on the warehouse shelves last week were girls’ uniform school blouses wrapped in plastic, boys’ coats still in bags, boxes of gloves, bundles of women’s sweaters. The retail sale tags had been stripped.
“Unintentionally, it is one of the city’s best-kept secrets,” said Mary Lanning, the chairwoman of the Clothing Bank.
Vast quantities of unworn clothing are destroyed every day in the United States. Last week, I wrote about a City University graduate student, Cynthia Magnus, who had discovered that a branch of the clothing retailer H & M in Herald Square was slashing new clothing that it could not sell, then discarding it in the trash. A cyber-cyclone followed: tens of thousands of people commented on Twitter. H & M said that it usually donated unsold clothes, and that the 34th Street store was not following proper procedures. Hundreds of people sent me e-mail. Many said that they worked at big retailers around the country where useable garments are routinely destroyed.
The reasons are complex. No business wants to compete with its own garbage, or risk having people show up at a store seeking refunds on clothes that were never sold. “That’s why many retailers will damage unsold garments,” said Luis Jimenez, the director of the Clothing Bank, which is now operated for the city by Peter Young Housing, Industries and Treatment.
Some businesses do not want their goods worn by poor people. Ed Foy, the founder of eFashionSolutions.com, said that brands invest billions of dollars in their images, using models and athletes, which makes them cautious about where donated leftovers might end up. “They want us to see that the people wearing their brands are the people we aspire to be,” said Mr. Foy, a board member of the Clothing Bank. “They want to know, ‘Who’s wearing the clothing and how can that hurt my brand?’ ”
From the outset, the Clothing Bank tried to address the business concerns, Mr. Jimenez said. The warehouse is secure, lowering the chances that the donated clothes would be stolen and resold; only not-for-profit groups receive the distributions, so that, for example, no individual can collect a pallet full of Dress Barn merchandise. Donations are tax-deductible. If a donor wants labels removed, they are cut out by volunteers, including inmates on work release from the Lincoln Correctional Facility in Harlem. “Hard workers,” Mr. Jimenez said.
The city stopped financing the bank last year, but Mr. Jimenez was able to get the landlord — also the city — to reduce the rent on the warehouse to $80,000 a year from $120,000.
Manufacturers and retailers became far more careful with their donations. Macy’s, which had been making deliveries to the bank three or four times a year, sent one. “It was 55 boxes,” Mr. Jimenez said, smiling. “The Gap is very nice, but they’ve been saying ‘we don’t have anything for you now.’ ”
And much depends on personal contacts. The bank had been getting regular shipments of diapers from Toys R Us, and expected one in September. “When it didn’t come, we called our contact there, and got no reply,” Mr. Jimenez said. “Then in November we got a call — the gentleman had passed away suddenly, and someone had just gotten into his voice mail. That same week, we got eight pallets of diapers.”
Now retired, Ms. Davis, the founder of the Clothing Bank, said she was heartened by the graduate student who disclosed the waste at H & M. Good ideas may have legs. They also need people to run with them.
In Downturn, an Upside: Generosity
By SUSAN DOMINUS
Recession got you down? Look on the bright side — it’s not a crisis, it’s a crisatunity!
That suspiciously upbeat word mash-up has become a term of art for political organizers, who usually use it in the context of e-mail messaging techniques. When such organizers try to raise awareness about a big problem — say, global poverty — they are talking about a crisis, which can evoke ennui and helplessness.
But if they can outline specific action to address a slice of the problem — sign this petition today that will embarrass this foreign government into resolving this human rights abuse! — then they’ve got themselves a crisatunity (pronounced CRY-sa-too-nitty). A crisis, but an opportunity!
Many social service agencies in New York stepped into December with every reason to think they would face another garden-variety crisis of the Great Recession — scant resources with which to brighten the holidays for children. “We had no idea where things were going to come from,” said Terry Troia, executive director of Project Hospitality, an interfaith organization that serves the hungry and homeless on Staten Island.
But crisatunity struck — even without a campaign of alarming and action-inspiring e-mail messages. As Christmas approached, new toys flooded into Project Hospitality from unusual places, including a correctional facility whose staff that sponsored a drive. “It was a banner year,” said Ms. Troia, “and the majority of gifts that poured out were from people we’d never met before.”
The same phenomenon bowled over Carolyn McLaughlin, executive director of BronxWorks, a community and social-service center that used to be called the Citizens Advice Bureau. Ms. McLaughlin estimated that she had 25 new donors providing gifts to 1,000 South Bronx children. Some of those did not exactly fit the typical local-business or corporate sponsor profile — there was a woman who had once lived at the agency’s shelter, and a motorcycle club called the Legion of Doom. The gifts were also more lavish than usual — “things like electric guitars and Easy-Bake ovens and brand new bicycles,” Ms. McLaughlin said.
Reports of similar bounty came in from Goddard Riverside Community Center, on the Upper West Side, Hudson Guild, a settlement house based in Chelsea, and the Supportive Children’s Advocacy Network, which serves East Harlem.
ADD it to the list of upsides of the downturn: A raised awareness of hardship can spur people to help. Abortion-rights groups, which see contributions rise when their opponents are in power, have long known about crisatunity, even if they didn’t call it that. This holiday season, some New York groups found they had to do less to get more, even from people who had less to give.
“It’s rough out there,” said Noel Andujar of Legions of Doom, who organized about 30 members to give toys to BronxWorks’ Positive Living, a service for families with a member who is H.I.V. positive. “A lot of the guys in the group are laid off, but they managed to pull through and give a toy.”
Ben Brandzel, who spearheaded many of MoveOn.org’s e-mail campaigns, first started using the term “crisatunity” in 2007, while describing the anatomy of effective organizing e-mail to other campaigns. “The heart of the concept is that in the same moment, you take in the scope of the problem and your ability to change it for the better,” he said.
He could imagine that if some of the energy channeled toward opposing President Bush’s policies could be strategically refocused, in this economy, toward service and charitable giving. And if he is right, what better way than through campaigns that emphasize both the depths of a specific local crisis, and the immediate effectiveness of giving (or volunteering) year-round, not just at Christmas?
But Mr. Brandzel did not coin the term, which reeks of millennial corporatespeak; for that, we have to thank the great lexicographer (and spoofer of millennial corporatespeak), Homer Simpson. In an old episode of the show, Lisa points out to her father that the Chinese use the same word for both crisis and opportunity. Homer replies, “Yes! Crisatunity!”
For better or for worse, 2010 will surely have plenty of it.
One about the clothing stores that destroy unsold goods before tossing them. Ugh.
A Clothing Clearance Where More Than Just the Prices Have Been Slashed
By JIM DWYER
In the bitter cold on Monday night, a man and woman picked apart a pyramid of clear trash bags, the discards of the HM clothing store that reigns in blazing plate-glass glory on 34th Street, just east of Sixth Avenue in Manhattan.
At the back entrance on 35th Street, awaiting trash haulers, were bags of garments that appear to have never been worn. And to make sure that they never would be worn or sold, someone had slashed most of them with box cutters or razors, a familiar sight outside H & M’s back door. The man and woman were there to salvage what had not been destroyed.
He worked quickly, never uttering a word. A bag was opened and eyed, and if it held something of promise, was tossed at the feet of the woman. She said her name was Pepa.
Were the clothes usually cut up before they were thrown out?
“A veces,” she said in Spanish. Sometimes.
She packed up a few items that had escaped the blade — a bright green T-shirt that said “Summer of Surf,” and a dark-blue hoodie in size 12, with a Divided label. The rest was returned to the pyramid.
It is winter. A third of the city is poor. And unworn clothing is being destroyed nightly.
A few doors down on 35th Street, hundreds of garments tagged for sale in Wal-Mart — hoodies and T-shirts and pants — were discovered in trash bags the week before Christmas, apparently dumped by a contractor for Wal-Mart that has space on the block.
Each piece of clothing had holes punched through it by a machine.
They were found by Cynthia Magnus, who attends classes at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York on Fifth Avenue and noticed the piles of discarded clothing as she walked to the subway station in Herald Square. She was aghast at the waste, and dragged some of the bags home to Brooklyn, hoping that someone would be willing to take on the job of patching the clothes and making them wearable.
A Wal-Mart spokeswoman, Melissa Hill, said the company normally donates all its unworn goods to charities, and would have to investigate why the items found on 35th Street were discarded.
During her walks down 35th Street, Ms. Magnus said, it is more common to find destroyed clothing in the H & M trash. On Dec. 7, during an early cold snap, she said, she saw about 20 bags filled with H & M clothing that had been cut up.
“Gloves with the fingers cut off,” Ms. Magnus said, reciting the inventory of ruined items. “Warm socks. Cute patent leather Mary Jane school shoes, maybe for fourth graders, with the instep cut up with a scissor. Men’s jackets, slashed across the body and the arms. The puffy fiber fill was coming out in big white cotton balls.” The jackets were tagged $59, $79 and $129.
This week, a manager in the H & M store on 34th Street said inquiries about its disposal practices had to be made to its United States headquarters. However, various officials did not respond to 10 inquiries made Tuesday by phone and e-mail.
Directly around the corner from H & M is a big collection point for New York Cares, which conducts an annual coat drive.
“We’d be glad to take unworn coats, and companies often send them to us,” said Colleen Farrell, a spokeswoman for New York Cares.
More than coats were tossed out. “The H & M thing was just ridiculous, not only clothing, but bags and bags of sturdy plastic hangers,” Ms. Magnus said. “I took a dozen of them. A girl can never have enough hangers.”
H & M, which is based in Sweden, has an executive in charge of corporate responsibility who leads the company’s sustainability efforts. On its Web site, H&M reports that to save paper, it has shrunk its shipping labels.
“How about all the solid waste generated by throwing away usable garments and plastic hangers?” Ms. Magnus asked in a letter to the executive, Ingrid Schullstrom. She volunteered to help H & M connect with a charity or agency in New York that could put the unsold items to better use than simply tossing them in the trash. So far, she said, she has gotten no response.
On Monday night, Pepa’s shopping bag held a few items. She pointed to her gray sweatpants. “From here,” she said.
How about coats?
“Maybe tomorrow,” she said.
And a follow-up, of sorts, of where they could send those clothes instead - kinda like the food bank, but for clothes.
Where Unsold Clothes Meet People in Need
By JIM DWYER
Good ideas have legs. One day in 1985, Suzanne Davis asked a friend, Larry Phillips, the president of the Phillips-Van Heusen clothing line, if his company had any excess inventory that could be used by homeless men. A few days later, Mr. Phillips sent 100 boxes of windbreakers to a shelter on the Bowery.
Then he nudged friends, and 750 London Fog trench coats arrived, followed by crates of Jockey underwear. “All this merchandise they weren’t going to sell, so what were they going to do with it?” Ms. Davis recalled.
A few years earlier, City Harvest had been created to rescue edible food that was going to be destroyed; separately, the Food Bank for New York City was established to collect and organize food for distribution.
Inspired by these projects, Ms. Davis, then director of the J.M. Kaplan Fund, organized the New York Clothing Bank to recover unworn garments. It opened in 1986 in a city office on Church Street, and now occupies a 20,000-square-foot warehouse in the Brooklyn Army Terminal. An executive from J. C. Penney helped set up the inventory system. Retailers and manufacturers donate goods worth $10 million annually. With a paid staff of three, the bank gives clothing to 250 aid groups, which help 80,000 people.
Stacked on the warehouse shelves last week were girls’ uniform school blouses wrapped in plastic, boys’ coats still in bags, boxes of gloves, bundles of women’s sweaters. The retail sale tags had been stripped.
“Unintentionally, it is one of the city’s best-kept secrets,” said Mary Lanning, the chairwoman of the Clothing Bank.
Vast quantities of unworn clothing are destroyed every day in the United States. Last week, I wrote about a City University graduate student, Cynthia Magnus, who had discovered that a branch of the clothing retailer H & M in Herald Square was slashing new clothing that it could not sell, then discarding it in the trash. A cyber-cyclone followed: tens of thousands of people commented on Twitter. H & M said that it usually donated unsold clothes, and that the 34th Street store was not following proper procedures. Hundreds of people sent me e-mail. Many said that they worked at big retailers around the country where useable garments are routinely destroyed.
The reasons are complex. No business wants to compete with its own garbage, or risk having people show up at a store seeking refunds on clothes that were never sold. “That’s why many retailers will damage unsold garments,” said Luis Jimenez, the director of the Clothing Bank, which is now operated for the city by Peter Young Housing, Industries and Treatment.
Some businesses do not want their goods worn by poor people. Ed Foy, the founder of eFashionSolutions.com, said that brands invest billions of dollars in their images, using models and athletes, which makes them cautious about where donated leftovers might end up. “They want us to see that the people wearing their brands are the people we aspire to be,” said Mr. Foy, a board member of the Clothing Bank. “They want to know, ‘Who’s wearing the clothing and how can that hurt my brand?’ ”
From the outset, the Clothing Bank tried to address the business concerns, Mr. Jimenez said. The warehouse is secure, lowering the chances that the donated clothes would be stolen and resold; only not-for-profit groups receive the distributions, so that, for example, no individual can collect a pallet full of Dress Barn merchandise. Donations are tax-deductible. If a donor wants labels removed, they are cut out by volunteers, including inmates on work release from the Lincoln Correctional Facility in Harlem. “Hard workers,” Mr. Jimenez said.
The city stopped financing the bank last year, but Mr. Jimenez was able to get the landlord — also the city — to reduce the rent on the warehouse to $80,000 a year from $120,000.
Manufacturers and retailers became far more careful with their donations. Macy’s, which had been making deliveries to the bank three or four times a year, sent one. “It was 55 boxes,” Mr. Jimenez said, smiling. “The Gap is very nice, but they’ve been saying ‘we don’t have anything for you now.’ ”
And much depends on personal contacts. The bank had been getting regular shipments of diapers from Toys R Us, and expected one in September. “When it didn’t come, we called our contact there, and got no reply,” Mr. Jimenez said. “Then in November we got a call — the gentleman had passed away suddenly, and someone had just gotten into his voice mail. That same week, we got eight pallets of diapers.”
Now retired, Ms. Davis, the founder of the Clothing Bank, said she was heartened by the graduate student who disclosed the waste at H & M. Good ideas may have legs. They also need people to run with them.
