On Thursday, January 26th, my group volunteered at Housing Works. Housing Works is an organizations who’s proceeds go to AIDS/HIV prevention. They give free medical attention, housing to homeless LGBTQ people, just to name a few. We volunteered at their Thrift Store. Instead of just using the money that is donated, they have two store fronts: their book store, and their thrift store. We volunteered at the Thrift Store because that is where they said they needed most help. When we got there, we put our aprons on and got to work!
Wearing the really cool aprons
We all split up and did different jobs. Mika started off by greeting people when they came in and said good bye when they left.
Mika saying hello
The rest of us split up and organized the clothing. John, who was supervising us, gave us a sheet of the specific rainbow order their clothing needs to be in. I organized the dresses, which took a really long time, but it looked really great in the end.
Sorting dresses
These are the dressed is color coded.
We all worked on different sections of the store:
Isabella sorted suit jackets
Annabelle worked on shoes and skirts
Then after about an hour, we switched jobs a bit and started new ones. I swept the whole store, while Isabella greeted people, and everyone else was helping in the back rooms taking inventory, and sorting items. We kept switching off since we were there for a long time. It was a really great experience because we got to see what it is like working in a store. A woman asked Juliet some really specific questions about shoes. Sometimes people would ask us about things we didn’t know, but we would just direct them to John. He was a really patient guy considering that he had to train volunteers almost every day. He told us that there was a woman who has been volunteering once every week for the past 10 years. It is a really great organization to help out. We ended up volunteering for four hours. It was a lot of work on our feet, but it was really fun. I think the color in the store really kept everyone lively all day. I really liked this fieldwork, especially since I like organizing. I feel like I stepped out of my comfort zone a bit because I ended up greeting people for the longest time out of anyone. I originally didn’t want to do this because I am pretty shy, but it actually went pretty well. Overall, it was a great fieldwork.
