In a world with next-day delivery, mass consumption, and lost packages, there is a lot of merchandise at risk of going to waste.
But a program at Grand Canyon University works to redirect those extra goods to families in need.
Paty Guzman makes a habit of rolling a cart down the aisles of an 88,000-square-foot warehouse off Colter Street and 27th Avenue in Phoenix.
“So just browsing around to see what basically catches my eye,” Guzman said.
She’s scanning shelves full of donated merchandise, but she’s not looking for herself. She works for Catholic Charities, which helps people who live on tax credit properties. Those are housing projects owned by developers or landlords who participate in the federal low-income housing tax credit program.
“I found socks last time I was here,” Guzman said. “So I’m planning to do a back-to-school event for the kids.”
The warehouse is owned by Grand Canyon University. Its program, CityServe works with charities like Guzman’s to deliver excess goods to low-income communities. Usually, each organization requests specific items and schedules a pick up time, but they can also look through self-select items for things they might not think to ask for.
“Like these calendars I just found, residents can use them to write down their appointment times, you know, stuff that they have going on,” Guzman said.
Nathan Cooper is the director of GCU CityServe.
“We started this in partnership with an organization called CityServe International,” Cooper said. “It’s based out of Bakersfield, California. What they do is they partner with organizations across the United States.”
GCU gets donations of returned, overstocked and discontinued items from retailers like Amazon and Walmart.
“So like an organization would donate 10 pallets to us of Tupperware, and the reason they donate it to us was because right after Christmas, they were sittin’ on it and it had Christmas packaging,” Cooper said. “So there’s nothing actually Christmas about the Tupperware itself. It was just that the packaging had like reindeer or whatever it was on it.”
A lot of times they don’t know what they're getting until they open the back of a truck. Then just a few staff members and thousands of student volunteers help sort the items into categories.
“So indoor items — that could be anything from bath mats, to shower caddies, to TV mounts, to fake plants, to throw pillows,” Cooper said. “So think [of] anything that you put in your house to make it feel like a home, I like to say.”
Other categories include hygiene products, medical equipment, kitchen items and small appliances, toys, baby items and the list goes on.
“Then our partners - we have about 150 partners across the state — they’re able to send in a wish list each week,” Cooper said. “We call it a wish list, but it’s a list of items that they have identified that are needed in their community.”
CityServe volunteers then pack pallets, specific to those needs for organizations to pick up from the warehouse.
“That means they don’t have to have storage space and they can actually pick it up from our doorstep and bring it right to the family’s doorstep,” Cooper said.
About 30-40 organizations stop by for pallets in any given week and they come from all over the state.
“We have organizations that come from Lake Havasu or Tucson so it’s a little farther of a trip,” Cooper said. “So they only usually come like once a month or once every other month, but then we have organizations that are right down the road from us that will come every week.”
Guzman is one of those people. She picks up donations every Wednesday.
“A resident of mine needed a walker and he’s been asking me for a walker for so long and sometimes we’re able to get it and sometimes we’re not,” Guzman said. “I was able to find one here and when I gave it to him his face lit up and he was really excited to get a walker. So it just brings me a lot of happiness.”
GCU President Brian Mueller said CityServe has grown a lot in just under three years and is still expanding. He added that organizations that are not contracted with CityServe are interested in partnering.
“They want to become part of it because they’ve got goods that they can’t resell into the marketplace,” Mueller said.
Volunteers have cleaned out closed office buildings to collect donated furniture. They’ve also hosted on-site events like drives for families to pick up boxes of food and hygiene products. Mueller said an organization that builds beds and is based out of Idaho reached out.
“They came down, they showed up at six in the morning, and they set up an assembly line and I got 150 students to volunteer,” Mueller said. “We built 80 bunk beds in a three-and-a-half period of time and got’em into homes, where kids were sleeping on the floor.”
Cooper said while there are a lot of people hurting in the world today, there are also a lot of people who want to help.
“We live in such a world of excess I feel that it’s not a lack of resources, but a lack of logistics and relationships,” Cooper said. “That’s really what we’re trying to build here.”
In the time CityServe has been a part of GCU, the program has distributed more than $12 million worth of goods to about 50,000 families.
