There are specific hours to donate items to the Neighbour-to-Neighbour Thrift Shop in Cochrane. And the manager of it and the associated Cochrane Food Bank wishes people would stick to them.
Ardis Proulx says the hours are 10:00am to 4:00pm Monday to Saturday, and the outside bin is open the same hours on Sunday. She’s asking potential donors not to leave stuff outdoors outside of those hours.
“Just because the weather can get to them,” she explains. “So if there’s freezing rain, rain, you put a table or something out there, it’s going to get waterlogged, it’s garbage. Now I have to then take it and dispose of it. So that costs the food bank money. It’s not serving the purpose.”
Proulx adds that some of the stuff being left that way is garbage to begin with, and people drop it there instead of going to the dump.
If the set hours don’t work for you, Proulx says alternate arrangements are possible.
“We did have a situation recently where a business needed to donate some furniture, and they made arrangements to have it dropped off at a different time. And that was fine, because we made those arrangements and we were able to have the staff and the volunteers available to do that.”
