Don’t throw things away, try give away instead

Today’s generation is obsessed with getting the newest and next best thing that’s on the market and this unfortunately results in a lot of new, working items being thrown away. This has affected Irish society so greatly that it has become a trend to buy the latest item on the market and to just throw older items out, becoming a “Throw Away Society” and not thinking of donating these item to those in need. As part of our YSI project our class, we want to address this issue and also link it in with the homelessness crisis in Ireland at the moment, because there is thousands of people who need help and there is so much that young people can do to get involved and help this issues like volunteering, donating and raising funds for the various charities who help daily.

We started our project on a local basis, asking for donations from students in school and old frames donated by school staff to upcycle and sell moving on to asking the local shopping centres for donations of surplus food stock. We talked to the local restaurants and local businesses about the project and tried to link in as much as possible with them, our area’s local McDonalds set up a coffee sticker scheme so people could donate their coffee cup stickers for the homeless and McDonalds would match the amount of cups raised, so far we have raised 100 cups of coffee and we receive used coffee grounds from our local Starbucks for the Green Schools department’s garden. Then on  December 14th our YSI class volunteered our time to the Inner City Helping Homeless with their event “#fillaluas” and brought all of our collected donations, we collected funds and spread the word about the amazing work they were doing for those in need.

Then in the new year we started to think about how we can make our project bigger, we got in contact with a production team and organised a day to film. This day was also important as we had made over 200 food packs filled with waters, sandwiches, teas and coffees donated by local businesses and over 140 wash bags filled with soaps, sanitary towels/tampons, toothbrushes, hairbrushes and vouchers for other products for the I.C.H.H. We also displayed all of the upcycled items that are to be resold to raise funds and spoke about our plans for the upcycled furniture that will be donated to a Charity after our event in April of this Year. After that we got straight into preparing for Speak Out.

Our YSI class have organised a school event that will be head in the school. We will be holding quizzes, talks and upcycling workshops with 1st to 3rd years and much, much more. We have so many ideas and would love to future the work we have already done well after this year’s YSI Awards and we hope that we have a lasting impact on the other younger generations.

If you’d like to get involved with the Inner City Helping Homeless, they can be contacted on their website, by emailing [email protected] or by calling 01 888 1804.