As final exams and the rush to start packing to go home approach, Baylor students often forget how chaotic move-out week is. You know the scene – dumpsters fill throughout the Baylor student housing bubble as students toss out perfectly usable clothes, appliances, and furniture in lieu of packing them up to take home.
Two business students, Edmond Oklahoma, junior Joshua Yoon and Dallas junior Nolan La saw this happening before their own eyes during their freshman year and saw an opportunity to create a solution for this problem in the Baylor residence halls.
Their solution was to start their own initiative: Bear-ly Used, a program that would allow students during move-out week to donate their unwanted items like clothes, furniture, or supplies into bins in the lobbies of their residence halls.
The idea for the Bear-ly Used program first came up when Yoon observed the move-out process in the Honors Residential College, the residence hall where he lived his freshman year. With so many items piling up in the trash, Yoon started to feel frustrated about nothing being done to solve this issue. Similar to what Yoon saw, La, a resident of Earle Hall during his freshman year, saw dumpsters overflowing with a variety of items that might be treasured to other people.
Yoon and La began doing more research and digging about the current infrastructure at Baylor and why it wasn’t working. They took their findings to the Baylor Campus Living and Learning and the Campus Sustainability Program to gather their thoughts before creating a deliverable.
“An important step in our planning phase was reaching out to other universities who had a similar program,” La said. “We reached out to Brown, Rice, and the University of Texas at Austin to learn more about how they built their programs and why their programs were successful.”
According to Yoon, one of the main partners for Bear-ly Used is Caritas, a nonprofit organization based in Waco whose mission is to provide immediate support to people facing food insecurity through a pantry service. In addition to Caritas, other local Waco nonprofits that work with the Bear-ly Used program include Waco Habitat ReStore, a nonprofit that helps build homes and communities through faith; Lovely Village, a nonprofit offering support to survivors of sexual assault; and Green City Recyclers, a textile recycling group from Houston.
Yoon and La believe this is an important initiative and are looking for other Baylor students who share the same vision as them to serve as volunteers. Although move-out time aligns with finals week and many students have final exams, Yoon and La encourage Baylor students to volunteer with the program, where students help assist in transporting, collecting, and sorting the collected items from the residence halls. All of the items picked up from each pod by the volunteers are moved to a central location where the partnering nonprofits in Waco take the items they need to help their respective communities. Volunteers are also tasked with looking through items and making sure that they can be taken as donations.
Yoon and La credit the skills they gained to lead and grow Bear-ly Used to the Baylor’s business program and The Consulting Group, a student organization that consists of highly motivated students who are interested in consulting. As students in the Baylor Business Fellows program – a highly flexible program that offers academic planning and advising to help students pursue ambitious multidisciplinary career goals – they took several courses and had guidance from professors to help them lead this program.
“Without us realizing it, we were using business ideas to solve this program by tailoring and understanding it,” La said. “It’s been very interesting to be able to apply a variety of skills like management and working with people to this project.”
Yoon and La are grateful for the support and help that they have received from the residence hall staff and directors, who were willing to assist in any way possible. After seeing the positive response to the program last semester, Yoon and La are looking to take the next step to grow the program by starting a garage sale, where students can purchase the donated items in good condition for a discounted price. Starting a garage sale would not only be convenient for students but also help fund Bear-ly Used for the future. Yoon and La are not looking to stop there, as they are hoping to scale across more halls, outside of the residence halls that are filled with mostly freshmen and sophomores. In order to see more growth in the second year of the program, they are also hoping to reach out to more local nonprofits in Waco that they can support.
“We didn’t want to scale the program too big and fail automatically,” Yoon said. “We are very proud of the solid foundation that we have built. For year two, it’s important for us to try to expand to other locations to capture more of Baylor and grow the sustainability initiative.”
Yoon and La hope their efforts can inspire more Baylor students to create solutions to problems like this. To any Baylor students looking to start similar initiatives, their advice would be to give your 100% toward that idea for an initiative.
“Every student at Baylor is capable of coming up with great ideas,” Yoon said. “The hardest thing in starting a program is action and implementation. My biggest piece of advice is to find someone else who cares about that idea to invest their time and passion into it.”
