Giving new life to unwanted items

The City of Ostrava has participated in a charity collection of various items for the NGO ‘Moment’, which runs charity shops selling second-hand goods.

City employees donated a large quantity of clothing and accessories, footwear, toys, crockery, jewellery, electronic items and sports equipment. In just three days, they collected a total 685 kilograms of unwanted items at the City Hall – helping to de-clutter their own homes while also giving new life to items that can be very useful for other people.

On the first day of the collection, the City’s employees donated 270 kilograms. ‘Moment’ volunteers collected the first set of items just one minute after the beginning of the working day; they praised the generosity of the City’s employees (most collections are around 200 kilograms). The items will appear in ‘Moment’ charity shops during late December and early January.

The money from the charity shops will be used to help partner organizations (also NGOs).

Each bag of collected items is equivalent to the following assistance:

• for the ‘Ondrášek’ mobile hospice: 90 minutes of life at home (under medical supervision) for a person with incurable illnesses.
• for the ‘Žebřík’ day centre (clients with multiple handicaps): One hour of expression therapy for all clients of the day centre.
• for the ‘Bikes for Africa’ project: Transport of one bicycle to Africa, enabling one child to attend school for several years.
• for the ‘Save Elephants’ project: One day’s food for an entire team of dogs in Congo (the dogs are specially trained to find ivory poachers).

In addition to the City of Ostrava itself, the Ostrava Zoo (a City-owned organization) was also involved in the collection. The Zoo collected 800 kilograms of items (though over a longer period than the City Hall collection).

The next collection at Ostrava’s City Hall is planned for the spring of 2018.

‘Giving Tuesday’, an international festival of charity donorship, celebrates people’s natural desire to help others. The campaign is held on the same day throughout the world; every year it takes place on the Tuesday following Thanksgiving and the ‘Black Friday’ and ‘Cyber Monday’ retail events. This year’s ‘Giving Tuesday’ was on 28 November 2017; it was the curtain-raiser for the traditional Advent/Christmas charity season. The national ambassador for ‘Giving Tuesday’ in the Czech Republic is the Association for Social Responsibility.

The photograph shows Monika Chwastková from ‘Moment’ with a certificate that we were given for our charity collection.