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October 6, 2010

Charity ()

by fluffy at 11:26 AM
I have an accumulation of Stuff that I should get rid of. In particular, my old TV, my old netbook, the XO I got from OLPC's "give one get one" program, and a few random perfectly-functional cellphones and iPods and such. Does anyone know of any good charities to which I could donate them?

My criteria:

  • Must not be faith-based (or if it is faith-based, must not use their charity as a platform for espousing rubbish)
  • Ideally would use the item directly rather than reselling it or recycling it for scrap or the like (so, for example, I'd rather donate my TV to a homeless shelter than to Goodwill, and cellphones to a charity which provides phones to the homeless than to the "cellphones for troops" things that just recycle the phones for pennies on the dollar)
  • Should be tax-deductible
  • For the TV, should be willing to pick it up themselves or be in San Francisco
Right now I'm leaning toward Compass, who I donated a bunch of stuff to last time I did this sort of cull, since I really like their mission and they satisfy all my criteria, but maybe someone else has better ideas? I don't think the TV or the XO are a good match for them, though, so I still need ideas specifically for those. (For the XO I did find Aspirnaut which is my first choice, if they get back to me.)

Comments

#13433 10/06/2010 09:47 pm
My employer has a program for donating computers through giftsinkind.org; yours may have something similar.
#13440 10/08/2010 09:35 am
Aspirnaut just confirmed they'll take the XO. It's not the sort of computer that is suitable for just any charity.

The Acer Aspire is, unfortunately, quite unreliable and just shuts down at random. So I don't know if charity is really the right option for it.

For now I'm just going to keep the TV in my bedroom.

Any idea what to do with the cellphones? Also I guess I should do something with my old gamecube too...
#13443 10/08/2010 03:36 pm
Where I work, donated cell phones go to the Wireless Foundation's "Call to Protect" program: http://www.wirelessfoundation.org/CallToProtect/index.cfm - It looks like they have several drop-off locations in SF.