Have you ever stayed at a hotel, and wonder why everything appears so much nicer than those in your home? How do all the towels, sheets, blankets look so new and feel so soft?

It turns out most of the hotel linens have a rather short lifespan of 6 months or less.  As soon as there’s a slight perfection, these linens are destined to be thrown into the landfill because they don’t meet the hotel franchise’s quality standards. 

Linens with a small pen mark or the slightest unremovable stain mean it’s headed for the trash pile. As it turns out, a typical hotel easily discards hundreds of linens every year.

For tens and thousands of hotel linens: is there life after being imperfect? 

Founded in 2014, Linens N Love (www.LinensNLove.org) is a student-run nonprofit organization dedicated to collecting and donating to be discarded linens from hotels to local shelters, in the form of student-led deliveries and an educational tour of the receiving organization. 

To date, Linens N Love has donated over 16,000 linens internationally. Linens N Love is based in California, but they have also donated and repurposed linens in other countries such as Mexico. Over the summer, Linens N Love donated 500 linens to a local orphanage in Los Cabos and raised over $1,000 to donate to the orphanage. 

Linens N Love’s volunteering actions are sustainable and environmentally friendly. Unlike typical cash donations solicited by most volunteer organizations, we ask for linen donations from local hotels that were planning to discard the items. Linens N Love will not run out of donation sources, as there are thousands of hotels and they will continue to discard a sizeable amount of linens due to daily use.

Deliveries provide a valuable experience in which students learn why sympathy is important, and how they have impacted their local community and reduced landfills. 

When hotels discard their linens due to slight imperfections, it negatively impacts our environment as landfills accumulate concerningly high amounts of waste when they could have been put to good use. Linens N Love helps to reduce our landfills as we repurpose these linens and provide warmth to shelters. 

While promoting volunteering, this organization seeks to redefine our perceptions of volunteerism by incorporating environmental awareness and social responsibility. Student leaders decided on this issue when visiting an animal shelter in 2014 for a school project and realizing that the dogs and cats were shivering through the cold winter weather. 

For the past 5 years, students have spread the mission of Linens N Love to more volunteers as we continue to organize deliveries to various shelters, including teenage shelters, women’s shelters, veterans shelters, and animal shelters. 

Linens N Love deliveries encompass two main components - packing the linens and then a guided tour. Guided shelter tours and Q&A sessions take place, providing a learning opportunity for the student volunteers to learn exactly how thousands of repurposed linens will be put to good use instead of going to landfills, and how simple actions lead to large impacts. 

Students learn the importance of sympathy, which in turn translates into them taking action and stimulating new creative ideas for future service projects.

Linens N Love’s milestone of the year was the Winter Leadership Training & Summit, a youth conference organized by Linens N Love that teaches students essential leadership skills to initiate, build, and lead their own teams of volunteers. A total of 20 youth leaders met at the conference in late December to participate in leadership lectures, deliveries to shelters, team bonding activities, and action planning for 2020. Leadership modules at the summit included modules covering communication, accountability, effective altruism, negotiation, and conducting a meeting.

Student leaders of each of the five chapters lead weekly online conferences to plan future service events. These conferences allow for leaders to effectively plan, provide support and guidance for newer leaders, and share personal experiences by communicating with their members. 

Chapter leaders improve their communication skills as they prepare themselves to lead and influence others effectively. This nonprofit organization can do a lot more for the local community due to this growing team of dedicated leaders and volunteers.  

With most schools being over 20 miles apart, Linens N Love creates a network for schools near and far to unite under a common cause of volunteerism, goodwill, and environmental awareness, all while being able to care for and serve their local communities. 

One of the benefits of Linens N Love’s model is its geographical extent with student volunteers being located throughout Southern California, which allows them to locate and identify shelters from communities that are closer to their schools. 

Linens N Love cannot wait to see what exciting adventures 2020 will bring.