Intrepid Teens Channel Donations of Old School Uniforms to 1,400 Families, Saving Them $140K

Two San Francisco area teens are providing a valuable service for low-income families in their community by collecting and redistributing donated school uniforms.

The brothers’ work also keeps the clothes out of landfills, where they break down over hundreds of years while releasing methane, a potent, yet short-lived greenhouse gas.

Anyone who’s had to shop for them year-in-year-out will know: children grow like weeds.

A uniform good at the start of school may not even fit them by Spring Break, and for families who live at the hand-to-mouth income level, it’s not always an option to simply continue buying replacements.

Desmond and Ethan Hua got the idea for their nonprofit redistribution service after seeing a boy arrive at Bayside Academy in Sat Mateo wearing shorts on a cold day. Asking their peer why it was he was freezing his knees off, he responded that he didn’t have another pair of pants to last him until laundry day

Understanding as well what a thousand wasted school uniform will do to the country’s emissions footprint, the boys launched HOPE : Help Our Mother Earth, in which they sought to eliminate textile waste by identifying textile want.

“We take in gently used school uniforms from families who no longer need them, and we redistribute them back to families in the community,” Ethan told CBS News San Francisco.

In the family garage, organized plastic chests cover the ground, each one stacked full of neatly folded uniforms for all sizes. The Hua brothers receive requests from students’ families, fulfill the requests if possible from the items they have in stock, and then leave them in collection bins at school offices.

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Those collection bins are also where families can leave uniforms that don’t fit their children any more, and can be found across 9 public schools in the San Mateo-Foster City School District that participate in the program.

“It started with our school, and then now the whole program is across our district,” said Bayside Academy principal Maria Demattei. “We are thrilled that we can contribute to that, to our Mother Earth.”

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