Fresh Brothers Collects 1,300 Sweatshirts!

After the market collapse in September 2008, six American million jobs have disappeared. According to NPR, more people are jobless for longer periods than any time since the late 1940’s.

These stunning and sad facts are lost on most 17 year-old kids; but not Jason Jones, a Mira Coasta High Junior. Last year, between SAT prep and homework, he founded “The Sweatshirt Project” an organization dedicated to collecting new and gently-used originally store-bought sweatshirts for the needy.







In December, Fresh Brothers teamed up with
The Sweatshirt Project with an extra large goal:
collect 1,000 sweatshirts by December 31st!
We placed collection boxes in all three Fresh
Brothers locations. And, to make it easy on
those who wanted to contribute, we added a
pick-up service. In between delivering pies to
families in the South Bay and Marina Del Rey;
Fresh Brothers delivery drivers were picking up bags of sweatshirts.




Our brilliant ad guy, Mike Pitts, donated
his time and created this moving ad
which was then published in the Beach Reporter. It was very effective! Donations started rolling in, and the local media soon caught on and began to cover the story.

Radio Station KFWB covered the story, and soon The Beach Reporter, The Easy Reader and The Daily Breeze followed with newspaper stories.

We realized that we had to get tv coverage to help boost our collection. Fresh Brothers uses Twitter and Facebook a lot, so I began tweeting the story to news professionals. To my total surprise, one of those people responded - Rueben Villaescusa (aka @Rubennews) - an assignment editor at Fox 11. He said "@FreshBrothers got ur message. We'll see if we can do something. So few resources, I'll do my best."

And he did! A reporter came out and did great story on our efforts.
Here's a link to the Fox Story: http://www.myfoxla.com/dpp/news/local/sweatshirt-drive-keeping-homeless-warm-20091230

And on that same day, Julie Sharp, a reporter for KCBS, came out and did this story:
http://cbs2.com/video/?id=123426@kcbs.dayport.com

On December 31st, I spent much of the day counting and bagging the sweatshirts. By 4 pm, we had about 900 sweatshirts. On hour later, we broke 1,000 and to date, we’ve collected over 1, 300 sweatshirts!

The Daily Breeze printed a story focusing on the final results of our drive.
This picture says it all!

This was a lot of work, but well worth it. We look forward to November, when the sweatshirts are distributed to those in need through the Richstone Center.

Thanks to all of you – our customers, family and friends who went above and beyond to help us reach our goal.