things i make for people
Carolina Thrift
A student-run nonprofit at UNC that turned dorm move-out trash into a 3,000-person sale. I founded it.
Every spring, college students throw out an absurd amount of perfectly good stuff on move-out day: futons, mini-fridges, lamps, clothes still with tags. I started Carolina Thrift to catch all of it.
The idea was simple and the logistics were not. Collect the move-out castoffs from the dorms, store it all over the summer, and sell it back in one giant fall sale. I won a campus pitch competition for the seed money, pulled together a team of fourteen students, and we threw the first sale to a crowd of over 3,000 people. In my years running it we raised about $20,000 and kept 20 tons of stuff out of the landfill.
The part that still gets me is that it outlived me. Carolina Thrift is a real 501(c)(3) now, has raised more than $50,000, funds student sustainability projects, and is still running every year. I got to talk about how it started at the 2019 Sustainable Brands conference. It was the first big thing I built that turned into something other people kept building, which, it turns out, is the kind of work I keep chasing.