Windmill Line Co-op’s charitable drives build community: willing to teach others

Robin Careless –

Every year, the Windmill Line Cooperative in the St. Lawrence Neighbourhood designates $1500 of its annual budget to go to charitable organizations. It then becomes the task of the co-op’s outreach committee to decide how that money gets divided, and how much goes where. They support a variety of organizations, and their donations go to help feed children, support the arts, and aid the homeless.

But their enthusiasm for helping the community doesn’t end there. They also do drives, where they and their neighbors collect all variety of items and band together to bring them to donation locations. And although the outreach committee has been in place since the `90s, the drives are a fairly recent development.

“We held our first drive in 2008 and since then we have had about five drives a year.” says outreach committee member Rosemary Merkley “We often focus on one group such as food, books or warm clothing, but we accept almost anything that will fit into a small car. Usually we get enough donations for five or six car loads.”

Not only do these drives benefit the charitable organizations that receive the donations, but the drives are also a great way to build a community, with newer members coming together with established members to make a difference.

It was this sense of community that brought in outreach committee member Vicki Trueman. “I like to be involved in my community and I like to know my neighbours,” she states. “When I lived in an apartment I didn’t have any conversation with my neighbours—there is a remoteness when there is no mechanism to get together and do constructive things. So in general terms, I think Windmill Line and other co-ops have a great method of fostering community cohesion via committees.”

Trueman joined the outreach committee in 2009, brought in by the drives. She saw a way to help her neighbors without cars to clean unwanted clutter out their units. Since then, using Merkley’s knowledge of organizations that solicit donations, they have been working and growing the drives.

One great example of the ways that the drives and community initiatives are continuing to evolve is their new work with Terracycle.

Terracycle is a recycling organization that only takes specific recyclables and in exchange they give money to a non-profit of the donor’s choice. A fellow member brought the organization to the attention of the committee and since then they and another Windmill Line team have worked together to raise over $150 for the Daily Bread Food Bank. While problems such as bedbugs have caused the outreach committee to stop holding swaps, they haven’t let it deter them from collecting donations. Instead they adopted a more careful method, asking members to exercise careful judgment when making donations.

Not content to only help the neighbors they know, The Windmill Line outreach committee has offered to help any local organization plan and or run their first drive, and are more than willing to give advice and direction to not-so-local ones.

For more information, visit www.windmill-line.coop.