ReDorm vs. Goodwill Give & Go

Goodwill's Give & Go program — run in partnership with Keep America Beautiful and the College & University Recycling Coalition — is the default most campuses reach for when they decide to do something about move-out waste. It's adopted at Stanford, the University of Kentucky, the University of Chicago, Penn State, and Georgia Tech, among many others. It works, and this isn't an argument against it. It's a look at what it does and doesn't do, so you can decide which model fits your campus.

What Give & Go actually is

Give & Go places donation barrels near residence halls during move-out. Non-food items go to Goodwill; food goes to campus pantries. It requires almost no campus infrastructure to run — no storage, no summer processing, no storefront — because Goodwill handles everything downstream of the barrel.

What a collect-and-resell program (like ReDorm) is

A collect-and-resell program keeps the items on campus: they're collected, stored over the summer, and sold back to incoming students at 60–80% off retail through a campus-branded storefront. It requires storage, summer processing labor, and a fulfillment process — real logistics Give & Go doesn't ask of a campus.

The honest tradeoff

	Give & Go (donation)	Collect-and-resell (ReDorm)
Setup effort	Low — barrels and a hauling schedule	Higher — storage, summer labor, a storefront
Where the value goes	To Goodwill and its resale operations	Back to incoming students, at a fraction of retail
Revenue to the campus	None — it's a donation	Can offset program costs or fund future seasons
Impact reporting	Aggregate, from Goodwill's side	Itemized, from your own inventory data
AASHE STARS credit	Supports OP 11.1	Supports OP 11.1, with more granular evidence

Why the economics differ, not just the logistics

The real difference isn't effort, it's where the value ends up. A donation drive sends the resale value of everything collected off campus, to Goodwill's own retail operation. A collect-and-resell program keeps that value in the hands of your own students — the same students who'll be furnishing a dorm room the following August, at an average of $192.40 per student on move-in essentials according to the National Retail Federation. Neither model is wrong; they optimize for different things.

They're not mutually exclusive

Several of the programs we've studied run both: items sold through a move-in storefront, and whatever doesn't sell routed to a donation partner like Goodwill rather than landfilled. If you're deciding where to start, our operator's guide covers picking a model, and our cost and ROI guide covers the budget case for each.