Underwear For The Homeless

The Globe and Mail:

It sounds like the setup to a bad joke: Two men drive a truck crammed full of skivvies across the country. But Got Ginch, Brent King’s cheeky charity campaign, isn’t just for laughs – it’s fulfilling a desperate need at homeless shelters coast to coast. A successful biomedical entrepreneur who invented the Spider, a surgical limb positioner used in hospitals worldwide, Mr. King, 43, could have signed a cheque and gone to play golf. But in September, he and Robb Price, founder of charitable-giving website DeliverGood.org, drove 75 hours over 11 days from Vancouver to Halifax, dropping off a total of 35,000 pairs of men’s underwear at shelters in 10 cities (the overwhelming preference: tighty-whities).

What keeps you going?

“On the road, it was hard to go three days without a shower, and then look fresh for an interview. It put us a little in touch with what homeless people go through.”

Lessons learned

“I used to think homelessness resulted from bad decisions. I realized that most of the time, it’s circumstance. How do you get a job if you don’t have an address or a phone number?”

Photo by fauxto_digit

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