MISSOULA — The school year is over at the University of Montana.
While most of campus was quiet Wednesday, hundreds of people and thousands of items packed Schreiber Gymnasium, raising money for the university’s Office of Sustainability.
"We turn Schreiber Gym into a giant community campus thrift sale," said Derek Kanwischer, a program manager with the Office of Sustainability. "It's really fun. It feels like kind of a community celebration for us."
Students had to move out of the dorms by last Saturday, along with their clothes, furniture, books and mementos from the school year.
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The thrift sale returned for the 11th year to keep those items out of landfills and give them new life in the campus community.
During move-out, a partnership between UM Housing and Sustainability set up tables and volunteers to collect unwanted student goods such as clothing, mini-fridges and bookshelves.
"If people have any donations that they'd like to leave behind, things that may not otherwise make it, fit into their car, things they're not wearing anymore, they can donate to us," Kanwischer said. "We're really grateful for our students to be able to generously donate their items to this cause."
Then volunteers and staff tackled a different kind of moving, organizing and setting up the thrift sale in Schreiber Gymnasium.
"We end up renting a U-Haul truck for the week when we collect stuff, and we pretty much fill it up every day. So I would say we probably filled it up maybe three and a half times, and it's a full 26-footer," Kanwischer said. "It's just remarkable the amount of stuff that we're able to collect. We don't assume that it's all going in the trash, although a lot of it would."
On Wednesday, people turned out to shop at the sale.
More than 500 shoppers and about 50 volunteers helped make the event happen.
Shoppers and volunteers came from across campus and the Missoula area.
At the end of the sale, unsold goods were donated to community organizations.
"It was crazy this morning. We started at 9 a.m., and there was a line all the way down the hallway, all the doors, and I think we had maybe 200 people in the first hour," Kanwischer said. "A lot of people used to teach at the university, they still do, or they’re staff, or they used to be students, and they just wanna be part of the campus community. They've seen these items go in the dumpster in the past, and they really like the idea of keeping closing the loop, you know, and making those items available to the campus community."
