Augusta Chronicle Visits to Cover ‘We Give a Shirt’ Donation and Sale
A big ‘thank you’ to the folks at the Augusta Chronicle for visiting the store and covering the recent ‘We Give a Shirt’ donation and our ‘Shirt That Keeps on Giving’ Sale.
Surplus fundraiser shirts on sale to help charity
This article first appeared on the Augusta Chronicle, linked here.
T-shirts that helped local businesses hurt during the pandemic are making a final appearance for charity.
The last of the shirts produced for the We Give a Shirt campaign went on sale for $5 each Wednesday morning at the Catholic Social Services Thrift Store on Wrightsboro Road. Money from the shirts will go to CSS.
Sean Mooney, co-owner of the promotional products supplier Showpony, helped start the campaign last April. T-shirts bearing logos of local businesses were sold to earn proceeds to help businesses that struggled during COVID-19 closures. The effort raised more than $251,290.
Mooney’s mother, Philomena, manages the thrift store she began in 1990. She said the shirts were selling fast the minute they hit the shelves.
“The first 45 minutes were people who must have participated in the We Give a Shirt program and kind of knew about them because they were literally standing outside waiting for us to open the door,” she said Wednesday morning. “And they didn’t buy one. They bought anywhere from five to 33. One lady bought 33 of them.”
Sean Mooney said that Showpony ordered extras throughout the fundraising campaign to protect against losses during shipping or requests for extra shirts. When the program wrapped up in December, about 1,000 shirts remained.
Photo by: Michael Holahan (Augusta Chronicle)
The businesses who participated were offered shirts to buy, which some did. The rest went to the thrift store to raise one last round of donations.
“We didn’t have that in sight when we started the program,” Mooney said. “But I think being someone who has been part of Catholic Social Services my entire life, with my mom running the thrift store, they have a long-standing commitment to serving those in our community who are most in need, and that lined up with the philanthropic goal of We Give a Shirt.”
Last year’s campaign has been modified to a more focused fundraising platform, Mooney said. Showpony still produces shirts for specific local causes, such as the Augusta chapter of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, and Friends of Frances, a local nonprofit formed to help raise awareness for rare genetic diseases and people with special needs.
“We just don’t promote it on the We Give a Shirt page as much as we did in the past, mainly because with the program coming to an end we did have to scale back a lot of our internships and logistics, so we can only handle a few at a time now,” Mooney said.
“They wanted the surplus to go somewhere where it would continue to be used for the benefit of the community, and that’s exactly what we do,” Philomena Mooney said. “So all the money is still going to help everybody.”