University program keeps unwanted furniture off the street

Nicole Elsasser

Kyle Gillespie had to move again. A fourth-year Marine Biology student at the University of Guelph, Gillespie was between apartments and was facing a dilemma all too common for the nomadic university student: what to do with all that unwanted furniture. Then Gillespie was told about the Move Out Madness program offered by the university and all of his moving troubles were over.

“What with the cost of bringing things to the dump and paying the disposal fee, I would have been left trying to sneak furniture into dumpsters or back alleys had it not been for the Move Out Madness group,” said Gillespie.

Move Out Madness, already in its fourth year, is a program coordinated by Off-Campus Living that offers students a simple and more considerate way of disposing of unwanted furniture than simply leaving it on the street and forgetting about it. Students who are interested in having furniture picked up by volunteers for the program can register online and then leave their bulky items at the curb where they will be picked up.

According to Bradley Williams, the manager of Off-Campus Living, the program grew out of a response to the way students had been disposing of furniture before.

“It was a response to the amount of furniture that was being left curbside,” said Williams. “Basically the university and the city were getting many, many complaints about the amount of furniture that students were leaving behind…the implications were a lot and it just looked bad on the university or on the community. The university response was, ‘Let’s see what we can do to minimize the impact.’”

From humble beginnings with only a few pick-ups, Williams explained that the program has grown, offering students totally free pick-up with simple online registration as well as having developed a cooperative relationship with the city of Guelph. The city allows the Move Out Madness program to drop off 20 tons of unwanted goods at the dump in kind while in past years they have had to pay.

According to Gillespie, some aspects to the program seem too good to be true for students with a lot of extra furniture.

“The move out madness team was fantastic,” said Gillespie. “I had a lot of furniture that I had no idea what I was going to do with. Living downtown meant that I couldn’t leave things out on the street for pick up, but that wasn’t problem for the move-out guys. They came right up to my place and helped move things down into their moving truck, all-free of charge.
While the program does benefit students, Williams explained that with all of the ways that it has grown over the years, it is able to give back to the community at large as well.

“We donate any bags of clothes that students leave curbside, we donate that to the Guelph Food Bank,” said Williams. “We donated mattresses to Wyndham House. We worked very closely with Habitat Restore so all of the nice items go to [them] so that they can restore them and sell them at a slightly raised cost to the community… The growth of the program has also been in its knowledge base with people understanding it and being aware of what’s going on.”

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