Naperville teen creates website to help donors find charities
One person's junk is another person's treasure, and Naperville teen Grace Paulson has made it her mission to bring those people and their stuff together.
The Naperville North junior recently created a website that connects the dots between items people no longer need and where they could best be re-purposed.
“I'm trying to make this an easy way to make donations to help others,” she said, “as well as getting people into the mindset to help other people by making it easy for them.”
The site, shareyourtreasures.org, lists more than 30 organizations in the Western suburbs and includes information about items they accept or are in search of — from prom dresses and lumber to eye glasses to compressors and power tools, and even old bicycle parts.
Paulson recently was looking for a place to donate stuffed animals and old soccer jerseys — relics from her childhood that were too sentimental for the trash bin.
Who could love them again? And who would love them the most? Those were the questions the Paulson family asked themselves as they called organizations.
The quest turned into the project for Paulson's Silver Award in Girl Scouts.
Paulson's mother, Katy, said the site is dear to her family's beliefs.
“In our family, I just hate to waste things. If there's something that's in good shape, then somebody is going to have a use for it and hopefully we can find who would have the best use for it,” she said.
“As you kind of go along in your little world, there's always things that pop up and you say, ‘I don't need this anymore, but someone might.'”
Paulson has dedicated about 150 hours to the project, which evolved from an informational packet for her Silver Award into the website as part of her Gold Award.
The site also includes an informational guide of how to run your own collection drive.
Todd Robert has witnessed firsthand the end result of charitable donations making it to those in need.
Robert, a neighbor of the Paulson family in Naperville, is an optometrist with Westchester Eye Care Associates. He's visited Honduras through World Gospel Outreach, an organization that collects used eye glasses.
World Gospel Outreach is now included on Paulson's website.
“It's pretty incredible to see the expression on the faces of people who have essentially been running around blind,” Robert said. “For the first time in 20 years, they're able to read a book or thread a needle or see someone across the room. It's pretty powerful.”
He's impressed with Paulson's work.
“I think it's fantastic,” he said. “It's really a neat thing that she's done, and I'm kind of blown away that she had that kind of drive to do something like that.”
As for Paulson's old stuffed animals, the items that inspired this project? They were connected with Stuffed Animals for Emergencies, an organization that collects stuffed animals to benefit children during emergency situations such as fires, illness, accidents, neglect, abuse, homelessness, and even natural disasters.
Paulson and her mother hope more people are being connected with items they need.
“In this economy, right now things are tough in so may places, and hopefully this will have an effect that ripples out into the community — if people are in need of furniture for their house or clothes for their kids or whatever,” Katy Paulson said.