Imagine a sort of heaven for office supplies: a place where pens with an outdated company logo are sent; where business envelopes with an old address sit in their cardboard boxes; and where old three-ring binders pile up after they’ve finished their tours of duty at companies across the state. While many a short stack of Post-it notes and old manila folders end up inside a dumpster, a select assortment of used ˆ— but still useful ˆ— office supplies make it to Ruth Libby, executive director of Ruth’s Reusable Resources in Scarborough, where they’re given a second chance in classrooms around the state.
Walking recently through the maze of bookshelves, bins and boxes at the resource center, which is housed on the first floor of a former school, Libby points out item after item donated by businesses. Each has a place in the classroom, she explains: Old thread spools donated by L.L. Bean make great jump rope handles. She plucks a plastic film container from a barrel. “They hold teeth when [students] lose them; or bugs,” she says. “That’s what they tell me.”
Libby accepts just about anything a business might throw out, from old office supplies and furniture to manufacturing leftovers and byproducts. All of those items could be used if they were in the hands of a resourceful teacher, she says. Over the past 13 years running the nonprofit resource center, Libby has become an encyclopedia of resourcefulness, learning how one business’ trash could be a teacher’s treasure. And because school budgets are often tight, teachers from every county are more than happy to travel to the resource center to get their hands on the free supplies she makes available.
To date, Libby says she has helped about 85 school districts and 30 nonprofits realize more than $10 million in savings. But after watching her organization mushroom in size, Libby has reached a critical moment. Her operation has already outgrown its 8,500-square-foot home at the former Bessey School. Her inventory spills out into 10 tractor-trailers and an extra 2,100 sq. ft. of storage space she rents in Portland. Even if she had enough room, though, the town of Scarborough plans to turn the Bessey School into low-income senior housing. Libby has until June of next year to find a new location for her organization.
Although moving is never on anyone’s list of pleasant experiences, the forced relocation has brought a new urgency to a situation that Ruth’s Reusable Resources has been facing for a long time: The need to create an operational model to match the organization’s size and complexity. Libby started the operation out of her basement with no prior experience running a business or nonprofit ˆ— she says she merely wanted to ensure that no Maine student had to go without basic school supplies. The growth it’s experienced up to this point has mostly been organic, unplanned and spurred mostly by word of mouth. (At least 400 businesses have donated items at one time or another over the years, Libby says, but she claims to have only contacted two directly.)
The explosive growth means she and her husband, Tom Libby ˆ— the only other full-time employee at the resource center ˆ— have to work tirelessly, unloading pallets of donated supplies by hand because they lack appropriate facilities or money for a forklift. Handling those tasks has meant little time to undertake basics like writing a business plan and organizing fundraising and marketing efforts, which Libby admits aren’t on her list of pleasant experiences, either. “I have it all up here in my filing cabinets,” Libby says as she taps her head with a finger. “But to turn around and write a business plan, ugh!”
Still, Libby is making herself tackle some of those mundane administrative duties, because she knows it’s necessary for the future of the organization. She has begun writing a business plan and has sent out fliers to solicit donations for her building fund. In cooperation with her board of directors, Libby has begun to focus on finding a facility that can adequately house the growing operation and bringing on staff members that will be able to help the nonprofit do more. “We’re hoping the closing of the building is going to have a real silver lining,” says Debbie Redding-Sampson, a kindergarten teacher in Kennebunk and a member of Libby’s board of directors.
Back-to-school shopping
On August 16th at noon, Ruth’s Reusable Resources will open for its 13th season. The first cars will begin arriving around 11 a.m. and about 50 to 75 teachers will line up to wait for the doors to open. There’s usually at least one television station on the scene ready to capture the event as it happens. “It’s kind of like the Filene’s Basement wedding dress sale that only happens once a year,” says Anne Brown, a ninth and 10th grade science teacher at the Casco Bay High School for Expeditionary Learning in Portland who has been going to Ruth’s for 10 years.
To use the resource center, school districts and nonprofits pay a membership fee ˆ— $2 per student or a flat $350, whichever is higher ˆ— which gives all the teachers in that district access to the inventory. Teachers can take whatever they want, as much as they want. Last year, for example, Libby went through 50,000 three-ring binders. “We’re trying to get [the material] to the kids who need it,” Libby says. “And the teachers are the people who can get it there.”
Usually the schools walk away with goods worth far more than the membership fees they’ve paid. During the 2004-2005 season, for example, the Westbrook school district paid a $6,000 membership fee ˆ— at that point the membership rate was only $1.50 per student ˆ— but Westbrook teachers took back to their classrooms $91,000 in pencils, paper, glue sticks, three-ring binders, and a multitude of arts and crafts items, according to Libby.
For that reason, teachers like Brown say Ruth’s is a godsend. The National Education Association says teachers in this country spend an average of $443 of their own money each year to meet the needs of their students. Brown, however, estimates she spends up to $1,000 of her own money every year on supplies and other odds and ends for her classroom ˆ— an amount that would be even higher if she weren’t able to find things like an overhead projector at Ruth’s. “She is the community service queen,” Brown says of Libby. “As local budgets get tighter and tighter, salaries and benefits don’t get cut. What gets cut is paper, pencils, supplies, science equipment ˆ— stuff that the public doesn’t see, but impacts student learning. That’s where Ruth comes in.”
Nonprofits also can join, and they receive the same benefits. Last year, Camp Ketcha in Scarborough paid the $350 membership fee and picked up $11,000 worth of supplies. Libby also says $35,000 to $40,000 worth of office supplies have flowed through her nonprofit to the Indian reservations in the state.
Those membership fees totaled about $100,000 last year, which pays salaries to Libby and her husband and transportation costs to truck donations to the Scarborough location. That money also covers gas for Libby’s white van, which she uses to pick up donations. She estimates she’s put about 332,000 miles on her van traveling all over Maine, New Hampshire and even Massachusetts picking up donations.
But with a line of teachers waiting at her door when the school year begins, Libby needs a steady and sizable flow of donations from the business community. Most of the time, businesses in the area will call the center and let Libby know they are cleaning out an office or purging their inventories; other times a box of items will just show up on her doorstep. While a large part of her inventory comes from regional businesses, she also receives truckloads of items on a regular basis as a member of a national organization of educational resource centers.
At times, Libby will be unloading, by hand, an 18-wheeler full of donated items shipped from a resource center in Atlanta. And Libby will never turn down donations, even though she has no more room and renting space is expensive. If she did, she says, that company probably wouldn’t call the next time. Whether it’s Preti Flaherty, a law firm in Portland, getting rid of old business envelopes or Sappi Fine Paper in Westbrook jettisoning old rolls of synthetic leather used in their manufacturing process, Libby will find a place for them.
Some of those businesses, like Sappi, are just happy to see material not go to waste. But people like Dominique Foley, a business communications associate at Idexx Laboratories in Westbrook, also appreciate the statewide reach of Libby’s organization. Foley says she brings about a carload of basic office items, such as pens and file folders, over to Ruth’s a couple times a month. She says the resource center has been identified by Idexx, which employees nearly 1,500 people in several communities in the region, as a worthy recipient of not only donated office supplies, but of cash as well. “She serves a wide area, and our employees live in a wide area, so it’s a great way to be able to indirectly help the schools where the employees have their kids,” says Foley. (Idexx also has donated $2,000 to the organization’s new building fund.)
Businesses also donate more than just small items or redundant office supplies. Ruth’s accepts old computers and monitors, which volunteer Chris Slader, a teacher from Westbrook, helps shepherd to needy classrooms. When Slader gets a stock of old computers from a business like Hannaford Bros. Co., he’ll post the new inventory on a computer mailing list of school technology managers from around the state. He says within hours, everything is spoken for. “And we’re just hitting the tip of the iceberg with the technology available,” Slader says.
Schools also can pick up donations of furniture from businesses moving or closing offices. Libby recently got such a call from UnumProvident in Portland, which was cleaning out one of its offices and didn’t need the furniture. Libby contacted her members and scheduled about eight school districts to show up at the office building with their own trucks to take the items straight from there. She says the schools walked off with close to $500,000 worth of furniture and supplies. “For places like Unum that really want to contribute to the educational system, but can’t always do it with moneyˆ… there’s a place like us that takes their castoffs,” Libby says. “They’re helping the schools tremendously, but not just always in a financial way.”
The Windham School Department received about $50,000 worth of that office furniture for use in its classrooms. “It had an immediate positive impact on the student environment and it also addressed some of our immediate and short-term financial needs,” says Brian Kenney, director of facilities and property services for the Windham School Department. “I’m absolutely amazed at what an awesome opportunity [Ruth’s] presents to the schools.”
Lately, Libby has been thinking of ways to streamline her operation to make it easier for teachers to find or use the items she has available. For example, she’d like to talk with teachers and find out what kind of hands-on activities could be incorporated into the curriculum, so she can create useful activities and learning tools for the classroom using items from the resource center. That way, instead of a teacher walking through the center trying to come up with their own creative ideas, Libby could assemble kits or products in advance. To help teach geography, for example, Libby would like to cut shapes of countries and states from old legal-size hanging file folders, which don’t exactly fly out the door. But to spend any time adding value to the materials she collects, Libby needs to have a more organized operation, more time and, most importantly, more space. “The things that can be done when we get into a bigger building will be phenomenal,” Libby says.
Calling for help
With no signs that demand for her services is slowing, Libby is planning for a future of growth. And one thing Libby knows is that she needs help. At the moment, she’s reaching out to anyone who can help her, such as local business people and organizations like SCORE, and trying to attract new members to her board of directors who have business experience ˆ— particularly in public relations, fundraising, marketing and graphic design.
Currently, her board mostly is made up of former and current teachers. She also would like to raise enough money to hire a development director, a volunteer coordinator and an office assistant. “I worked in a retail shop all my life, so I know how to stock a shelf and work a register, which I don’t have here,” Libby says. “But in terms of fundraising, marketing, PR and the whole business aspect of this business, I don’t know that part of it.”
She’s collected advice from fundraising experts like the Maine Philanthropy Center and directors of other education centers around the country who’ve told her she should have no problem receiving sizable grants from national organizations because her services are unique for the area. But pursuing those grants will require a few changes, including significant ones like hiring a development director. Experts also have advised Libby to change the name of the nonprofit to one without “Ruth” in it, and which includes more catchy words like “kids” and “education.” “We have to redefine our image and let people know better what we do, because it’s an amazing difference that [Libby] makes,” says board member Redding-Sampson. “But it’s kind of a quiet difference right now that people don’t really think about.”
Libby also has sought advice from the network of education resource centers around the country. Several years ago, she joined a network called the Kids in Need Foundation, which is run by the Dayton, Ohio-based trade organization School Home Office Products Association, which comprises 21 resource centers that serve 1.3 million children and about 75,000 teachers annually. Ruth’s Reusable Resources is unique in the group in that most of these centers are run by staffs with development directors and grant writers, and trained warehouse workers with forklifts to unload their 18-wheelers. “When [Libby] comes to the gathering of all the resource centers each year we’re always trying to convince her, ‘You can get other people to help you,'” says Penny Hawk, managing director of the Kids in Need Foundation. “Ruth is only one person and she can only do so much.”
Libby says she also is the only one of the other resource centers that charges the schools membership fees; the others use grants and corporate underwriting to fund their operations. Redding-Sampson says broadening the funding structure to include corporate sponsorship is a key element to transforming Ruth’s into a more sustainable nonprofit, “so that schools that have very tight budgets, and are getting squeezed more and more, don’t have to pay the lion’s share of the costs.”
Of course, first the organization must raise funds to find a large location in the Portland area. So far, Libby and her board have raised about $22,000 towards a goal of $1.5 million to $2 million. She’s never asked businesses in the past for gas money or disposal fees to take would-be trash off their hands. But she’s asking them now for help and to donate to her building fund.
She pictures a large warehouse to handle all the donations, a workshop area for volunteers, a store for teachers and eventually, a store open to the public. Then, after she finds a larger space and Ruth’s Reusable Resources graduates to the next level, Libby will begin looking toward her next goal: Opening other resource centers around the state. She’s identified Bangor as the location for the first satellite facility, and then perhaps one in the Houlton area or in Washington County. The Portland area warehouse would act as the distribution center, but a network of centers would make it easier for teachers from all over the state to find what they need. “Some people call it a dream,” Libby says. “But it just makes sense.”
Whether Ruth’s ever makes it that far will depend on the changes Libby and her board are making today. One thing Libby’s certain of, though, is there will always be a need for her supplies, and enough businesses willing to donate. “There’s enough stuff being thrown away that would take care of every school district in this state,” Libby says. “It’s just a matter of having a space to put it all and letting people know it’s there.”