Volunteering at Good Shepherd with the Trillium Lions!

Philanthropy is very important to me.  On Sunday, February 1, I attended the Trillium Lions‘ volunteering event at Good Shepherd.  Good Shepherd is a non-profit organization that provides services for the homeless like a soup kitchen, worship centre, and clothing bank.  

Good Shepherd Ministries at 412 Queen Street East, Toronto

On this day, the 20 or so of us gathered together at 10 a.m. to volunteer our time and provide our hands to do any tasks that were in need of completion.

A picture after the monthy general meeting

We first listened through the February general meetings of the Lions before we began.  On this day, the only available chore was to sort the donated clothing in their sorting room in the basement.

We put on our gloves and got to work!  We sorted through the bags of men’s clothing into shirts, pants, jackets and hung them onto appropriate hangers in the room.

Many hands make light work

Since there were a lot of us, we managed to go through the donations pretty quickly.  Tracy and I got dispatched to the food sorting area for a couple of minutes where I saw a group of young volunteers already in action and sorting through packages of pasta, canned goods, and other non-perishable food items into boxes and barrels.  It was really cool.

Some brief pictures of what the food sorting area looked like

Lots of packages of new underwear that we sorted into small, medium, large, extra large sizes

Not more than 5 minutes and we were called back downstairs to help with sorting the mountains of donated clean underwear into their respective sizes on the shelves.  This was a male centre so that’s why we sorted all the female and children garments into another pile.

There were two mountain-sized cardboard boxes full of unsorted underwear (some in packages and some loose but all were brand new — phew!) and socks.  We were able to work as a team to bring all the items out of the boxes and into their respective categories on the shelf.  The guys took charge of identifying the packets of underwear and the girls organized them neatly into the shelves.

Our result? Finish sorting two large cardboard boxes of underwear and clearing it out completely!

These shelves were empty when we arrived. When we left, it was all full of organized underwear. We did good 🙂

There were a LOT of underwear and we resorted to boxing up the rest and labelled them.  Many hands make light work and we were done before our allotted end time of 1 p.m. — we left at around 12:30 p.m.

This was a really good experience and I can’t wait to help out again!  I want to do more of these sorting tasks because it’s fun, straight-forward, and for a good cause.  Yay! 🙂  Can’t wait!

We took a group picture outside the building and then headed towards Distillery District (very close by) to have a Winterlicious lunch together!