Main Street Maury
COLUMBIA WEATHER

T-shirt drive becomes labor of love




Gould

Gould

Right around the time we launched Main Street Nashville in March, I called Mary Hance, also known as Ms. Cheap, to see if she would be interested in writing a weekly column for our newspapers. Mary had shared money-saving tips with people for years, and I knew our readers would love to read her feature stories and thrifty tips.

As we finalized our plans for her column, Mary had one request. She wanted to continue the good charitable work she has become known for and wanted to make sure Main Street would help promote her various efforts. I, of course, readily agreed.

Serving our communities by helping people is part of our mission and something we enjoy doing. We have built our readership across our various platforms to more than a million people a month, so we knew that, in combination with Mary, we could do some good.

Mary’s first idea was to continue a long-standing promotion — the Ms. Cheap T-shirt Drive. The goal was to collect as many clean T-shirts as possible and donate them to Room in the Inn. Mary also solicited the help of co-sponsor NewsChannel 5, and we all worked together to advertise the T-shirt drive and secure drop-off locations across Middle Tennessee.

 

 

The plan was to run the drive for a few weeks and then pick up the T-shirts and bring them to our house in Gallatin where my wife, Ellen, and I would sort and fold them before delivering them. It wouldn’t be that hard. After all, how many T-shirts were we really talking about here?

I’m not sure what I was thinking.

We made the trip with our large van to one of our offices in Lebanon for our first pickup and barely got a third of the T-shirts to fit. There were bags and boxes and more bags and more boxes and more bags and boxes. We also picked up T-shirts in Hendersonville, Clarksville, Murfreesboro, Dickson and Nashville. We loaded and unloaded that van more times than you can imagine.

Most people donated shopping bags full of shirts and, to the credit of the donors, the T-shirts were clean and in excellent to good condition. We got sports team shirts, Bible school shirts and 1,200 shirts from one company that had misprinted shirts and was looking for some place to donate them. Our favorite was a group of shirts promoting a family reunion that was held in 2019.

When we brought the shirts to our house, they filled two rooms as well as the garage. We were overwhelmed with thousands of T-shirts. It became a family effort, which included our teenagers at home, to help fold and sort them.

After a week of getting the T-shirts ready, we recruited several of our kids’ friends to help get them delivered. According to our friends at Room in the Inn, the drive collected 15,000 T-shirts.

It was an exhausting process for everyone involved, but I’m sure none of us would change a thing. What a wonderful opportunity it was to use the power of the media to help those less fortunate! And, who knows, maybe one day we will see someone walking around in one of those family reunion shirts.

Dave Gould is the owner of Main Street Media of Tennessee. The company publishes 13 local newspapers, 17 websites, social media pages and magazines, as well as podcasts and live videos. Dave, his wife, Ellen, and their family live in Gallatin. He can be reached at dgould@mainstreetmediatn.com.

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