Care & Share Thrift Shoppes is responding to community needs by taking steps to help prevent drug overdoses and reduce stigma for individuals living with substance use disorder.

Care & Share partnered with St. Luke’s Penn Foundation and the Bucks County Drug and Alcohol Commission to install two Overdose Emergency Kits in its shoppes. On April 10, one kit was installed on the exterior of the building between the clothing shop and the two medical provider offices, and another kit was installed at the entrance of the Book Shoppe.

Each kit is temperature-controlled and located in a publicly accessible space. They contain 2-3 units (4-6 doses) of Narcan, CPR mask shields, other PPE, and drug and alcohol resources.

“We are pleased to make these Overdose Emergency Kits available to our community,” says Sarah Bergin, Executive Director of the Care & Share Thrift Shoppes. “By installing these kits within our Shoppes, we are increasing access to a tool that can help prevent deaths by drug overdoses.”

Ryan Schweiger, CPS, CRS, Community Outreach Specialist for St. Luke’s Penn Foundation recently provided an educational training on Narcan to the Care & Share staff. Each employee had the opportunity to receive their own package of Narcan and other resources such as Fentanyl drug testing strips. “An overdose can happen to anyone, said Schweiger. “It can happen to someone using drugs illicitly, and it can also happen to someone who is prescribed opioid pain medications for medical purposes. The individuals who experience overdose are our family members, our friends, our neighbors, our colleagues. Many factors play into the risk for overdose, and Care & Share is in a position in the community to care for the community. They are responding to this with positive energy knowing that if these efforts save even one life, then it was worth it.

“One reason that cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.” ― Gwendolyn Brooks, In the Mecca

The team in the Variety Shoppe would like to be as happy as your cats!  But right now, they are suffering from a shortage of newspapers to wrap up customers’ purchases!

Could you help them out by bringing in a stack of your newspapers that you were going to recycle?  We would be grateful for this.

We can’t open this request to the general public, as when we previously accepted newspapers in Donations, it overwhelmed the system.  So this request is just going out to our volunteers and staff.  Thank you, if you have newspapers to share, you can drop them off at the Variety Shoppe when you come to Care & Share!

 At the beginning of the year, we made the decision to change the timing of our weekly tag color sale rotation.  Our color discount now begins on Wednesdays with goods at 50% off through the following Monday.  On Tuesday, items remaining with the sale color are then 75% off.  Previously the color rotation ran Monday through Saturdays, with 75% off on Saturdays.

We’re happy to report that our Tuesday sales have increased dramatically from prior years.  After just three months, it is clear that our customers have found our new final clearance day and are turning out!  In addition, we have received positive feedback that our Shoppes are now open till 7PM on Tuesdays. 

Historically, Tuesdays were our slowest sales days.  Since the timing of the rotation has changed, Tuesday sales are routinely 50% higher than in the past.  Where prior to this year, daily Tuesday sales seldom exceeded $10,000, they now routinely are $14,000 and above.  Tuesday, March 26, saw a new sales record for a Tuesday - $17,587!  

You might wonder if our revenues on Saturdays were negatively impacted by this change?  Our Saturdays have remained strong.  While the item count is down slightly, the overall sales remain strong, and our customers have a wider choice of “50% off” items to look over, as the color sale period is only in the third day.  This helps to validate the data we observed in 2023, that the overall percentage of items sold on a Saturday at 75% off was only 20-30% of the units sold those days.

We have fielded a handful of negative customer comments and feedback on the change to the rotation timing, but the overall response has been excellent.  Tuesdays we have more volunteer help on hand to assist customers with large orders of sale items, and our use of Tuesday as the final clearance day is comparable to many other MCC Thrift Shops.

As always, thank you for the role all of you have in the operations of Care & Share.  Dedicated volunteers make our business a success!  

Care & Share was started 49 years ago by a dynamic group who were striving to make a difference in our local community and around the world. Our foundation was made up of volunteers with dedicated church groups that would come to volunteer one or two days a month to ensure the Shoppe was always staffed. This was back when our Shoppe ran solely on Volunteer Power! And those groups are the reason that Care & Share has grown into the shopping destination that we all know and love today. This was a wonderful way to connect our organization with local churches, the community, and recruit more helping hands as that one Shoppe continued to grow. At our peak, we had upwards of 30+ different churches supporting the Clothing Shoppe through these monthly groups of volunteers serving together. Today we have just 14 churches that continue to volunteer in the Clothing Shoppe. This drastic decline of Volunteer Power has shown itself in the amount of funding we can continue to provide to MCC and our local community.  In order to continue to grow our service to the community and MCC, we would love to see an expansion of our foundation church relationships.

Would your church, parish, or synagogue be open to committing to a day or half-day of service at Care & Share?  The benefits of being a foundation partner are not only the good the group performs for the work of our organization, but also providing a way for members to strengthen connections with their fellow worshippers, increase involvement with the local communities they live in, and provide service opportunities that can encourage younger members to consider the importance of volunteerism in their lives.   As we work to expand our Foundation Group, Maggie stands ready to help your group get started.  This may be an opportunity for your congregation as a whole, a Sunday School class, youth group or womens or mens club.  We know that sometimes 'getting to the first step' can be challenging, so let us help.  We can assist with bulletin announcements, determining dates or times that may work best for your group, and other support.  You can help by sharing your enthusiasm and positive experiences with others in your congregation.  

We would also like to thank the Church Representatives who recruited church members to serve over the years. Maggie will be reaching out to those Reps to talk about how Care & Share can continue to be engaged with their congregation.