Unless you’ve been living under a rock since last semester, you’ve heard about the donation collections and the resale drives that Trash to Treasure held at the end of last semester and the beginning of this one. Many of you probably even helped out! Well, did you know this? The brains behind Trash to Treasure are a Changemaker Institute alumni!

Trash to Treasure collects reusable items that are normally thrown away when students move out of the dorms for the summer, cleans them, and resells them to Tulane students at discounted prices. This venture helps protect the environment while offering cheap dorm room essentials to students! Margot Habets, Tracy Godbe, and Anne Bevis have marketed, organized, and promoted the events of Trash to Treasure. To help start them off, they received $10,000 from the NewDay challenge last year. Not only that, but they successfully raised $12,500 in their first sale, exceeding their initial goal of $5,000!

Here are some words from Tracy Godbe, one of the co-founders of Tulane Trash to Treasure and an alum of the Changemaker Institute:

At the end of my sophomore year of college, I was distressed by how much residents threw away. There were charity donation trucks on campus, but they only collected a fraction of unwanted items. I remember stockpiling things in my room to give to friends and charities because I couldn’t bear to see anything go to waste. Over the summer, I started looking for ways to combat this problem, and when my now teammate and friend Anne Bevis contacted me the following November about participating in Changemakers and launching a campus waste reduction program, I was excited to get started.

Last January, my teammates Anne Bevis, Margot Habets, and I started in the Changemaker Institute and began going to weekly workshops about how to launch a social venture. The Changemaker Institute provided a lot of really good resources for us to develop our idea and get if off the ground running.

The best parts the Changemaker Institute:

• Getting to work with other students who are equally as passionate about social change. It was inspirational to see the diverse array of projects that teams were working on and see those projects grow and change throughout the semester. It was also beneficial to have 15 other minds to bounce our ideas off of and get feedback to really shape our project into the best it could be.
• Learning how to define your project. How does your idea benefit the community? If you implemented your program, what would success look like? How are you going to make your business sustainable? What resources do you need to start this? Having an idea in your head is one thing, but making it a reality takes a lot of time, brainpower, and planning to be able to thoroughly answer these questions. I thought that our venture was so straightforward, but writing a short concise 30 second elevator pitch about exactly what our program is and what it will do was one of the hardest things we had to do.
• Learning from the best. The Changemaker Institute brings in speakers every week, most of whom have already successfully started their own venture! These speakers detail on their own experiences and provide lots of valuable tips and resources that aided us in carrying out our program.
• Receiving guidance in writing our NewDay Challenge application. Writing a concise and thorough ten page proposal is daunting, especially when the success of your project is on the line. This workshop helped us to convey our project in not only an organized manner, but also a manner that is appealing to the judges. We won $10,000 from the NewDay Challenge, allowing us to launch our program.
• Free lunch every Saturday. Obviously not the only incentive, but the Changemaker’s Institute does not skimp on feeding minds hard at work.

After completing the Changemaker Institute, my teammates and I had the funding and skills to launch a successful move-out waste reduction program at Tulane. If you went to the first ever Trash to Treasure sale, you saw the results of our hard work. I’m really proud of what we were able to achieve, so I’m listing some of the results below:

• Diverted over 25,000 pounds of reusable items from the dumpster
• Saved students and parents thousands of dollars on back to school shopping
• Donated over 6,000 of items and $5,000 of sale proceeds to charity

If you are passionate about social change and have an idea that you want to develop, then I highly recommend enrolling in Changemakers! Don’t have a team? Don’t worry! Our team expanded from 3 people to 10 people while we were in Changemakers. It truly provides a great environment to learn about social change and inspires you to create your own. Thanks for reading!

Do you also have an idea that could bring social change to campus? Changemaker Institute can help you develop your idea and increase your chances of receiving funding! Apply by November 13th.