Material left behind in the dormitories of Illinois College students who moved out for the summer was loaded onto trucks and shipped off to various non-profit groups yesterday.
IC runs a program called Chuck it for Charity, which has, for the past four years, donated more than seven tons of left-over items to local groups such as the Salvation Army, The Attic, Goodwill, and several elementary schools, as well as The Imagine Foundation.
Megan Prough is the student organizer for the charity program.
“A lot of our students only get one carload home, or one suitcase home, so they throw away a lot of good stuff,” she says.
Prough says the program has gotten larger every year.
“When I first started this my freshman year, I thought, you never know how students are going to react to something new. So I thought, maybe we’ll get 30, 50, maybe 100 pounds of stuff. Our first year, we got 2,000 pounds of collected items to give to the community. So, it was really mind-blowing for me,” Prough says.
And Prough adds food gets donated to the Jacksonville Food Bank.