When you walk into Community Kindness of Eastern Oregon, you immediately see well curated shelves of secondhand items and people chatting with neighbors, finding treasures for their homes. At the center of it all is an energetic woman with a British accent chatting and laughing with customers. Liz Meyer, the owner of the nonprofit thrift store in downtown La Grande, OR, has spent years creating a space that is more than just an ordinary thrift store– it’s a community gathering place where people come to connect with each other.
This past weekend, Environment Oregon partnered with Community Kindness on a Back to School Clothing Swap. Back to school season is a time when parents feel pressured to buy a bunch of new clothes and school supplies for their kids– but it doesn’t have to be this way. The idea behind a clothing swap is simple: bring clothes you no longer wear and swap them with neighbors, to keep the clothing in use for longer, reduce waste and opt out of the idea that we always need to be buying new items.
Before the event, Liz gave me a tour of her store. In the past six years, the store has expanded from one small space to three full floors. Two floors are for clothing and home goods, and the basement, which has recently been transformed into a community gathering space, is where she holds ladies bingo nights, cooking classes for kids, musical events, and more. For Liz, Community Kindness is more than just a thrift store. It’s meant to be a place where people can come to connect with each other, to “have a chat and a laugh.”
In addition to being a community space that brings people together, this nonprofit thrift store also helps reduce waste.
“Can you believe all of this was destined for the landfill?” Liz said as we walked through the back room in the basement where they store all of the goods that have been donated. The back room is full to the brim of neatly organized shelves of clothing, toys, home goods, books, electronics and more– items that someone no longer wants or needs. Instead of ending up in a landfill, most of these items will eventually make their way onto the store shelves of Community Kindness.
Everything on the shelves was donated to the shop, mostly by people in the La Grande area, but also from as far away as Utah and California. The profits made from selling the items goes to support other nonprofits and good causes in La Grande. There is a small army of volunteers who come in to repair electronics, count the pieces of each board game, clean the clothing, and more. Being there was a good reminder that it can take some work to breathe new life into our things, but the effort is almost always worth it.
In the end, our Back to School Clothing Swap was a success. We had well over a dozen families participate, bringing over 200 items of clothing to swap and finding some new-to-them clothes, shoes and backpacks for the upcoming school year. Several people encouraged us to come back again next year, and Liz has already put us on the calendar for 2026.
What Community Kindness is doing in La Grande shows that we don’t need to be spending so much time, energy and money accumulating more and more things– most of us have a lot more than we need– and instead we should focus on finding ways to keep the items we have in use for longer, share what we have with others, and build community connections. That will help build a cleaner, greener– and kinder– future here in Oregon and beyond.
