The Coat Drive
My time at the 20th Annual, New York Cares Winter Coat Drive has come to a close. So far, we’ve given out approximately 53,500 coats to agencies who give them to needy New Yorkers.
So, what was the meat of the Coat Drive like? Great! I got to do fun stuff like grab the bags of coats, bring them down to people picking them up, or pick up the coats that folks are dropping off. I pushed around big red bins, up and down a long ramp to the freight elevator where Jose or Earnie would shuttle me between the 6th floor, where all the coats reside, and the loading dock.
Earnie is a great guy. He and Jose both took care of everyone working for the coat drive. Earnie would wait for us to load the elevators, would sometimes load them himself if I was tied up or had a big delivery of coats. More importantly, during the frequent elevator rides he would just talk about life. ’People need to have patience.’ ‘People like that don’t think about anyone but themselves, that’s why we in this mess.’ I don’t have lots of quotes, but Earnie just seemed to have a clear perspective on so much of life and interactions with people. Earnie is like Lawrence on Office Space, or an amazingly insightful supporting character – like the Andy Griffith character in the movie Waitress. I know it’s a little vague, but I can’t say enough good stuff about Earnie.
There were other characters – most nice, some just obnoxious – who worked at the building. Everyone respected the work we did, though. We’re handing out coats to people who need them. What’s not to like?
Some of the folks who came to pick up coats were crotchety and sour, though. ”What? You don’t have new coats? Why won’t you give me a new coat? Why aren’t you loading them in my car? I’m not supposed to do this.” They were few and far between, but they stand out for their absolute sense of entitlement and lack of respect for us – the Coat Drive workers – as team mates in the constant struggle to help those in need. We’re on the same team.
Still, most of the rest of the folks – people who come from agencies that work with the homeless, agencies that rehabilitate drug addicts or alcoholics, churches, food kitchens, and the like – were happy that we could provide something they couldn’t have gotten on their own. They were a pleasure to work with. And by a pleasure, I mean, I wasn’t left with a bad taste in my mouth when they left with the coats they had requested.
My teammates – Wes, Andrew, and Edith – were also great to work with. It really does take four people to run the show. OK, so let me back up in this rambling narrative to explain what the show was. We have a couple different activities that happened throughout the course of the day. We had people dropping off coat donations. We had people sorting the coats. We had people calling about coats. We had to schedule people to come pick up coats. We had people coming to pick up coats.
The Applicants: Applicants had to be nonprofit organizations or government agencies that agreed not to sell the coats we gave them. The agencies sent in applications, beginning in October 2008, requesting a certain number of men’s, women’s, kid’s, and infant’s coats. Although most could follow directions, more than a few missed the bold, underlined sentence that clearly stated your request should not exceed 500 coats. Some agencies asked for close to 2,000 coats. Most, asked for what they thought they could use.
When they came to pick up their coats, there were a variety of vehicles used. Some groups came on foot and called a car service. Others came in sedans. Others came in minivans with the seats still in them and three extra people who just took up space. Some had done this before and rented U-Haul trucks to hold all their coats. It became amusing to me to see that people asked for a few hundred coats, then arrived in a car with the seats still in it.
I’m sure it’s not something you think about all the time, or even much of the time, but how much space do you think 200 coats takes up? Have you looked in your closet or wardrobe? How much space do those 2, 3, 10, 25 coats take up on the racks. Now, stuff them in bags, five to a bag, and imagine 30 or 40 bags. What kind of a car would you need? Mini-van? 15 passenger van? Ford Focus?
In case you were wondering, here’s a quick run down of a car’s carrying capacity for coats:
- Mini-van, with seats: ~125-150 coats
- Mini-van, no seats: ~200-225 coats
- Expedition or similar SUV: ~100-125 coats
- Excursion/Suburban SUV with seats: ~150 coats
- 12 Passenger van, with seats: ~225 coats
- 12 Passenger van, no seats: ~300-350 coats
- 15 + Passenger van (no seats), or U-haul truck: the maximum order of 500 coats
It’s amazing how you get a feel for what a car can take. You learn to ask what type of vehicle an agency has, whether it has seats, and how many extra people they have. Without really thinking about it, you have a gut estimation of how many coats each of these parameters knocks off the total you can stuff in the car. My favorite answers to the question of what kind of car – “A red one.” ”No, make, is it a mini-van or a van?” “It’s a Dodge.” “Yes, that’s nice, but what kind of a Dodge?” “I don’t know.” Truly? Do you really not know the difference between a car, a van, a mini-van, or a big long “Church van”? Yes, others would answer, “It’s a church van.” I took that to mean it was a 12 passenger bus or something similar.
Lots of folks looked at the three bins of coats – 150 total – and wondered aloud with disbelief whether they would all fit. ”Yes, they will. You won’t be able to see, but you’ll get all the coats in. I promise.” To hit the higher end of the numbers, it usually involved me going into the car and just jamming myself and the bags of coats into every corner of space. You have to tear a hole in the bags of coats so you can squeeze out every last bit of air. I was always thankful for the smaller orders, they were easy and quick, but the larger orders always left me feeling a sense of accomplishment.
Delivery: In my previous post, I talked about the coats coming in from police precincts, the transportation terminals, and a few other places. I hadn’t yet experienced a true delivery. One that came in a 15ft or 18ft truck that was packed to the gills, even though trucks don’t have gills, with overstuffed bags of coats. Some of the bags must have weighed 40 to 50 pounds. The great thing about the deliveries was that they often happened on the street. As in, the trucks couldn’t come onto the loading dock, so we had to use a rickety, temporary ramp to wheel the carts in and out of the building to pick up dozens, upon dozens of bags of coats. Given the need to share the freight elevator with the contractors working in the building, it could take a long, long time to fully unload all the coats. Still, it was good to be lifting and wheeling, always moving.
The Volunteers: New York Cares manages volunteers. Volunteers come to sort the coats. They eat away at the pile of donated coats, dumping them on tables, deciding whether the coat is a man’s, woman’s, kid’s, or infant’s coat. They bag them five to a bag, usually, and then throw them on the pile of sorted coat. We count our coats as we send them out the building. It would be nice to know how much comes in, but without a standardized system for packing, we can’t know how much comes through the doors.
In general, the volunteers are great. They’ve got the enthusiasm and energy needed to plow through the work of sorting. Some volunteers are less meticulous in their counting – or perhaps you can say overzealous, thinking that if 5 is the target number, 7, 8, or 12 is better, not realizing there is a reason we only want 5 coats in a bag.
What’s more interesting to me, is that I can sense the difference between a 5 coat and a 7 coat bag. In much the same way, you get a gut feel for the volume of vehicles, you get the sense for the wrong weight – up or down – for a bag of men’s coats, kid’s coats, etc. Who knew you could determine with surprising accuracy that a bag of men’s coats had too many?
The volunteers we had from a couple groups tore up the pile. One group sorted about 2500 coats in two hours. Another group sorted about 5000 coats in the same amount of time. Regardless of how many coats a specific group sorted, they all helped us with a successful coat drive.
Wrappin’ It Up: I spent my last day with the coat drive calling agencies who had already picked up coats to see if they wanted to come back to get clothes. People who donated to the coat drive didn’t always give us coats. We get roller blades, ice skates, t-shirts, bras, and suits. Among the other gems donated was a full cockroach suit, replete with extra legs and wings. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. So with that, I leave you.