Give and Go Green is a donation drive held at the end of every spring semester. We collect items like mini fridges, fans, and lamps to store over the summer and then sell to new students during Fall NSOP at the Green Sale for a very discounted price. Each year, we accept around 40 volunteers from our applicant pool to stay a week after school ends in the city to help collect and sort through donations. These donations culminate in the Green Sale, which takes place during Green NSOP. Although Give and Go Green generates revenue for Ecoreps to fund other large projects like Greenfest, we also donate all of the clothes, food, toiletries, and books we receive to local charities, and have been the largest donators to Goodwill in the past years.
Green NSOP takes place at the beginning of Fall semester in which a group of 30 to 40 Columbia students come to campus during NSOP to help Columbia Housing with new student check-in while preparing for a giant annual sale, called the Green Sale, of donated and salvaged items from the previous semester. These items are collected in a program called Give and Go Green. At the Green Sale, all students, both new and current (and even alums!), can find a large selection of used items at affordable prices. Popular items at this sale include textbooks, mini fridges, fans, lamps, and kitchenware. Every year, we collect and sell thousands of items to divert usable items from landfill. All proceeds from this sale are used to fund EcoReps' sustainability initiatives, such as GreenFest.
SO MANY REASONS.
During reading week, you will be asked to help set up donation boxes in the lobbies of residence halls and begin initial collection. This should be only a few hours of commitment, and the hours are extremely flexible-- we'll work around your finals schedule!
In GGG, you will have essentially two tasks: collecting and organizing. For collecting, you will be going around to different residence halls in teams with green bins (blue bins, but in iconic EcoReps style) to pick up donations left in the lobbies. Later on, we will go floor to floor and pick up anything left behind in the hallways as well. The items you pick up will be brought to Wien lounge and sorted and boxed by the organizing team for easy transport to Manhattan Mini, our storage location. Two days will be devoted to moving the items into storage; on these days, we will send a team down to Chelsea to meet our moving trucks on the other end and help unload (lunch for this team is typically at Chelsea market, still covered by us). There will also be two days of the program dedicated to washing, taping, and numbering the hundreds of fridges we collect to prepare them for storage.
In gNSOP, your responsibilities will be divided into tabling for NSOP, moving our GGG collections from storage back to Wien lounge, and helping put on the Greensale! On tabling days, you'll welcome new first-years with sustainability kits as they check-in with housing for a short shift (you won't be expected to table for the entire day). Often, you'll be the first student that the first-years interact with on campus! On moving days, you'll work 9am to 5pm-- we'll have a team load up trucks in Chelsea and the rest of us in Wien lounge to unload and organize items for the Greensale. During the actual sale, you'll get assigned a specific task and a shift (you won't be expected to work the sale for the entire day).