By: Scott Bruner
SF Goodwill Industries

Goodwill and Whole Foods Partner for 2011 Earth Day Donation Drive

This Friday to Sunday (April 15-17), we hope you’ll help us celebrate Earth Day by dropping off household items at your local Whole Foods store to help your neighbors get a hand up.

Goodwill Industries and Whole Foods Markets are teaming up to divert over 20,000 pounds from landfills while helping people transform their lives during the 2011 Goodwill Earth Month Donation Drive.

When you shop this weekend, you’ll see Goodwill Industries’ familiar donation boxes and bins at 14 Whole Foods stores in the Bay Area. To see if your local Whole Foods Market is participating, head to our map of participating stores.

We invite you to drop off items such as clothes, shoes, books and small household goods. At certain locations we’ll take in your old tech goods, from computers to printers, to refurbish or recycle. In 2010, we refurbished 800 computer systems and recycled 13,370 more.

Your donation supports your community in two direct ways. First, your unwanted items won’t be clogging a landfill. Last year Goodwill was able to reuse and recycle nearly 20 million pounds of goods – 600,000 individual donations of goods, enough to fill 15 football fields – significantly lowering the impact on our strained landfills. During this year’s Earth Day Donation Drive, our goal is to receive 20,000 pounds of donated goods – over 125 shopping carts of materials diverted from landfills.

Second, by allowing Goodwill to reuse and sell your unwanted items, the revenue we generate goes directly back into programs to serve our community. We’ve been a non-profit since 1902 with a storied track record not just in environmental stewardship but also for social responsibility. But we’ve only been able to do it because of people like you.

Goodwill is especially pleased about our partnership with Whole Foods. When we were looking around for local businesses to team up with, Whole Foods just made sense. Their dedication to providing local, organic, healthy and sustainable foods with a business model of becoming an active, integrated, supporting member of the community is close to our hearts.

All of our stores are staffed by folks who need a hand up (instead of a handout). Some of the many programs we provide – all made possible by your unsolicited donations – include a city program to help non-violent drug offenders get back on track, job training classes for our underserved communities (including training in the expanding green collar sector) and life skills academies for at-risk youth.

Goodwill has been around for over 100 years, started by a Methodist minister in Massachusetts whose common sense approach to reusing unwanted clothing and household goods for those in need laid the groundwork for today’s broad-based Donation Movement.

Here in the Bay Area, Goodwill serves San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin counties. Some of our upcoming initiatives include the first phase of a zero waste strategy and creating a repurposed and recycled clothing line in San Francisco. To learn more about Goodwill’s environmental and community work, visit sfgoodwill.org.

Whether you’re a regular shopper at Whole Foods or an eco-conscious neighbor, we hope to see you this weekend! Your donations are tax-deductible, and you’ll get a receipt. Please take part in this effort to save the planet and help a neighbor, one neighborhood at a time.