Mililani Middle School Raising Money For Goodwill

Goodwill can be found at Mililani Middle School, but you have to act soon.

The Central Oahu school is wrapping up a threeweek- long Goodwill donation drive that began May 1 to collect gently used clothing and household items.

Students taking the school’s Yellow Track Business elective organized the drive after volunteering at Goodwill headquarters.

The students helped to sort donations, interacted with Goodwill’s adult day health participants and learned about its mission to help people with employment barriers get jobs.

After researching various marketing strategies, the students created a challenge similar to the popular Ice Bucket Challenge to get more of their schoolmates involved.

The Dirty Clothes Challenge uses social media to encourage others, with the hashtags #dirtyclothes and #goodwillhawaii, to take the challenge and dump a bucket of old, smelly clothes over their heads.

Like the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, if a nominee doesn’t respond to the challenge, he or she has to donate gently used clothes or items to the Goodwill drive.

“Social media catches everyone’s attention, and it’s pretty easy, so we hope it will have the same effect,” said student Taylor Sakoda.

This is the second donation drive for the business class.

In November, they organized a canned-food drive for Hawaii Foodbank and collected 625 pounds of food from their schoolmates. They are hopeful the Dirty Clothes challenge will get more of the students interested in helping others.

The last day to donate is May 21.