Swift Current youth were able to pick up some helpful donations from Dorie's House yesterday during their Give Back event.

Dorie's House receives a ton of community support, and plenty of that is in the form of donations. Those donations include things like coats, jackets, shoes, shirts, pants, socks, gloves, toques, boots, mittens, and more.

When they have so many donations and begin to run out of space, the question arises of how to best utilize the surplus.

Rebecca Donnelly, the executive director for Dorie's House, said that they couldn't let it go to waste and decided to inject their good fortune back into the youth of Swift Current.

"We said, you know what, we have to make sure that this is available to all the youth in the community," said Donnelly. "That's when we decided to have this event, just inviting people to come and check out what we have and maybe learn a bit about the programming while you're here and take a bag of stuff away with you."

They set up tables and rows of clothing articles as well as some other things like food and toys for folks to come and peruse. They were able to talk to Dorie's House employees about how they operate and help out their members.

"It's for youth only, 100 per cent free," Donnelly affirmed. "Youth could show up with their parents, neighbours, or friends. We totally encourage that type of support. We want to give back directly to the youth that these donations were given for."

The setup inside was reminiscent of a garage sale, with everything displayed on tables, baskets, and hangers. This was no accident.

"Honestly, when we were reorganizing our spaces and pulling everything out to see what we had on tables, we were like, this looks like a garage sale, quite jokingly," Donnelly said. "And then we were like, wait a second... we should have a garage sale! Obviously, we didn't want to charge anything. We received it, and we want to give it back, so that's where we came up with the idea of a free garage sale."

If anyone would like to make donations, they can find their "wish list" on their website, which is updated at irregular intervals depending on demand and need.