Instead of paying to ship the items you don’t need to your new home, why not donate them? Your old household goods like furniture will go to a new home where they will be appreciated. Here are some charities that might help.

Furniture Bank Network

Furniture Bank Network helps people furnish their homes with practical secondhand items donated by people within the community. Tax receipts for the value of the donated items are given to donors (捐赠者). Recipients get the furniture for free. People can get furnishings from their local Furniture Bank only if they are referred to the organization through one of its social service partners. It also encourages applicants to help the organization with volunteer work.

Habitat for Humanity

Habitat for Humanity is a global non-profit. It collects monetary donations to build and remodel affordable housing so that those in need can apply for it. You can also donate furniture and other household goods to Habitat for Humanity. It resells these items in home improvement stores and uses the money to fund its humanitarian efforts.

Goodwill

Goodwill resells donated furniture and other household items to fund its charitable objectives. Goodwill uses its earnings to provide career training and employment assistance for unemployed individuals. It also offers discounts to the people enrolled in its training programs, allowing them to affordably furnish their homes and buy clothes for their families.

PickUpMyDonation.com

PickUpMyDonation.com isn’t actually a donation center and it doesn’t pick up your donations. Instead, it helps you find local non-profits and charity shops that do. If your donation isn’t large enough for a local non-profit to send a truck, PickUpMyDonation.com can still help. The company will put you in touch with a local moving company to pick up your donation and take it to a nearby center.

One Brazilian chef（主厨）, Regina Tchelly, is using traditional ways to repurpose(赋予新的用途) leftover food（吃剩的食物）, feeding her community via her social project Favela Organica. Tchelly was shocked by the amount of food she saw thrown away daily in the city’s markets, because she had grown up with the knowledge of how to use every part of fruits and vegetables.

Favela Organica began as a grassroots project, with Tchelly teaching small groups of women from her community how to repurpose leftover food that they got from local markets and grow their own produce in their yards.

“It started in my house with six stay-at-home moms,”she said. “We wanted to bring a new way to the food inside our houses. It was from this that Favela Organica grew. With these six moms, it became ten; then it became fifteen; then it was fifty, and then the world welcomed the project.” Later, she expanded(扩展) her offerings to courses such as urban gardening and so on.

But the benefits (益处) of Tchelly’s courses go beyond helping the environment. From her free courses for the locals, people learn tips on using food waste that help them save money on their bills. One of Tchelly’s students, Ivonides Silva uses the skills she learned to start a small baking business. She sells some cakes, earning about ＄42 a month. The extra income from the project is a huge boost to her family. “Tchelly gives us the tools to create a small business to make some money, which changes our life greatly,” Silva said.

With no signs of slowing down, Favela Organica continues to develop from the ground up. The good environmental and social influences of Tchelly’s project set the stage for a healthier future for all.

Molly Wilson had been a dancer and a mother for many years when she decided to sail around the world to raise money for charity.

As a child she had trained as a ballet dancer, but at 15 she had grown too tall for classical ballet, so she became a member of a pop dance team.

She got married and after she had children she retired from show business to bring them up. They grew up, and when they were 18 they left home.

She says, “When I decided to do the round-the-world race, my husband thought I was bored because the children left home. He was also worried because I had never sailed before. I was not bored, but I had met some people who told me about the race. They had taken part in it, but they had only done one section, say, from New Zealand to Australia. I wanted to do the whole ten-month journey.”

Before Molly left she did a lot of training, but it hadn’t prepared her for the worst weather which they experienced. By the end of October last year, she had raised more than $ 50, 000 for charity.

She says, “Sometimes I ask myself, what did I do? How did I do it? But then I think, it’s the same as being a dancer. Before I left on the trip, I had trained hard. I had got very fit and had prepared myself completely. Then on the trip I was simply a good team member.”