Frugal Fairhope was created due to an inspiration to help our friends and family. We love giving back and helping others. In our household we donate everything, from old tennis shoes to eyeglasses, old clothes, anything that we think someone could use.

We try and get into the spirit of giving throughout the year and not just at the end of the year. Here are a few programs that are beyond the most common like Good Will and the Salvation Arm to help you get into the spirit all year long.

Prescription Eye Glasses
Drop or mail in your old prescription eye glasses.

Onesight.org for drop off locations in your area. If you don’t have a location in your area, mail your glasses to Lion’s.
Lion’s Certified Collection Centers
1734 Divisadero Street
San Francisco, CA 94115

Newspaper
Tired of recycling your newspaper? Try something different and donate your newspapers to your local animal shelter.

Magazines
You can donate your magazines to nursing homes, doctors offices, libraries high school teachers for projects, and kids groups.  Make sure you ask before you leave them. You can even send them in care packages to soldiers. Check out AnySoldier for details. We give them to our family to enjoy and they in turn give them to others.

Hair
Locks of Love Locks of Love is a public non-profit organization that provides hairpieces to financially disadvantaged children in the United States and Canada under age 18 suffering from long-term medical hair loss from any diagnosis. We have a close friend of ours who lets her daughter’s hair grow long for the year and donates it to Locks of Love.

Coats and Jackets
This is one of our favorite ideas. We just love the photo of the cub on their site. Don’t know what to do with your grandmother’s old fur? Give it back to the animals. Coats for Cubs uses the coats as surrogate mothers for wild animals.

Have some old blankets, towels, comforters, or winter jackets? Don’t toss them, even if they have holes in them. The dogs and cats won’t mind, we promise! Donate them at your local animal shelter or ask if your vet will take them.

Shoes
Don’t toss those old tennis shoes no matter what shape they are in. There are several programs out there that will take old tennis shoes.

Appliances
Don’t leave appliances at the street. Google for a list of organizations that will repair those appliances and resell. You can even take them to a metal yard to recycle and help keep them out of the landfill.

Children Items
If you have kids you know that there are some things that you can’t sell and you wouldn’t want to give to charity because they might throw it way. You know the things that are fine to use but have a small hole or a stain, missing button, used bottles that no one buys. You may even have some new items that were never worn but are too little to return and not valuable enough to sell. Give those items to a friend of a friend. Ask your friends if they know of someone that maybe could use a little “Baby Care Package”. It could be anyone; even a pregnant clerk in the store that you know is not making a lot of money.

Frugal Fairhope does this secretly, the mom that receives our “Baby Care Package” doesn’t know who we are (at least we think they don’t ). We send this as “a friend that thought they could use these items”. Our “Baby Care Package” is things that can fit into a shopping bag. Some of our items include clothing, coupons, blankets, samples, bottles, toys, and magazines. It’s not much but we like to think that we are giving someone that little help.

If you know of someone that could use a “Baby Care Package” send us an email and we will put together a package for her.

We hope we have inspired you to think twice before throwing anything away and think about if they can be given away to someone that could use them.

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This entry was posted by Frances on Monday, May 18th, 2009 at 1:46 pm and is filed under Frugal Fairhope Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.