Overall total is 263,500 (and we are still counting)

It’s been a busy month at our sorting premises so a big “thank you” to our wonderful volunteers who have been opening, sorting and bagging underwear. For the first time since August last year we are working on donations received in the last 2 weeks! This is amazing given the volume of underwear that has been received, which of course leads to another thank you. Thank you to all the people who have donated, we’ve published 2 more thank you posts. One dated 5 July and the other on 19 July.

As well as getting caught up on opening all your donations we’ve managed to get over 14,000 pairs of pants and bras ready for their journey to Africa. Thanks to Jean Moyes for organising underwear to get to South Africa courtesy of Save the Children and to Freedom from Fistula Foundation and Kenya’s Children Home for taking underwear to their fistula patients and children in Kenya.

I’m often asked whether we sell the bras we collect or if we donate them. So I thought it was worth outlining our approach and some recent changes too. Since we started, Smalls has been giving new or gently worn bras to the women we help, for free just like the new pants we collect. Over the past year we have also been sending some of the bras we have collected to a recycling company here in the UK, to raise additional funds for our work. However, several things have recently prompted us to review our approach to bras, including the fact that the recycling company we were working with ceased trading and we have been receiving a much bigger volume of bras than in the past, which has meant we have needed more volunteers for sorting and more storage space too. We trialled a few other recyclers as part of our review, but ultimately we have decided that it makes more sense to focus on what we have always done. So from 1 August we will only be collecting new or gently worn bras that Smalls can recycle directly, by giving them to the women in Africa who we help. This means we will no longer take well worn bras.