Kelley Lewski's Journey with Heartening

Words by Mallory Lehenbauer

Five years ago Kelley Lewski found herself in a dark depression, and she knew she had to get out of it—somehow. 

“All I really saw in the world were the worst parts of it,” she says. “The waste, the carelessness, the suffering, and it got to such a point that I also was laid off. I didn't want to get out of bed. I didn't have a purpose.”

Determined to turn things around, Kelley decided she had to volunteer or find one small thing to do every day to put some good into the world. As she volunteered at several community organizations around Austin, Texas, she noticed the lack of resources these organizations had, despite their significant needs.

She says she looked around and thought, Oh my gosh, I have that, or, I can collect that from neighbors. And I started doing that and maintaining these lists around where to donate items, and I became kind of a resource on where to donate anything. I used to print literal lists in the trash rooms of the apartment buildings I was living in, and then I maintained a giant Excel sheet and always had my phone number there so people would reach out.” 

Kelley became a one-woman team and curator of donations, collecting items from friends, neighbors, and strangers, then finding the proper place for each item at local organizations. There began the journey with her organization, Heartening, whose mission is to show every unwanted item where it is wanted. The entire idea is built on her belief that if unwanted items knew where they were needed, people would help them get there.

As a volunteer with other organizations, “I started to realize they were asking and yet getting a lot of things that were still becoming waste,” she says. “So, early in my volunteer days, I would take the leftovers from one charity and go take it and drop it off to other places that needed it. 

There's just such a pain point of bad matches when the wrong item goes to the wrong place at the wrong time, which creates waste. And so, it's constantly about how you get better at matching the right item in the right amount at the right time in the right place.”

Beyond curating and collecting items, Kelley started a website where donors can search by items and find the exact organization looking for those particular items. In addition to giving people a resource for where to donate the right items, she continued to work as a collector of gently used items from her own living space.

In 2023, after her apartment had served as a storage and sorting room for a few years, Kelley officially launched a commercial space to use as a sorting room and a place to hold events and manage donations. Heartening now had a home base.

“This donation/sorting room is an experiment, and it's very, very hard [and] takes a lot of sweat and a lot of volunteer hours to keep this running,” she says. “I want the idea that this kind of thing can work in many different ways, and I just want to show that here's how a sorting room could look. This is a concept that any community could do—having this central haven to rescue anybody’s unwanted things.”

The Heartening sorting room is 440 square feet and full to the brim. On one wall, there are at least 2,000 items. With the sorting room, they can now donate 2,000 to 3,500 items a week. Each week, about 190 trash bags of items are sorted, prepped for drop-off, or stocked on the walls in preparation for free giveaway days and clothing swaps. All of this is possible because of the 15 to 25 volunteers each week contributing about 80 to 120 hours of volunteer time.

“For every dollar we spend in expenses, we can donate five dollars. We're able to turn one dollar into 50 dollars of savings in the community,” Lewski explains.

In total, they donate about 10,000 items per month, while the organization's expenses are only around $2,000 a month. 

“This is such a math problem, and it requires community, right? To make the math work. That's another major lesson of just how I've grown to think about this problem and how central community is.”

Kelley shared that she used to think of giving and charity as a cycle of the wealthy giving to those in need.

“But what I realized now is that giving is something we all need to participate in as equals. Those who give most generously are those who have received, and that is such a powerful, incredible thing that I witnessed,” she says. “We should all be participants in reuse and giving. Everyone should be able to give something. Everyone should be able to take something, and we need to feel that.” 

Kelley still works a part-time job, dedicating 40 unpaid hours on top of her regular life to make Heartening work in her community.

“We could keep Austin clothed for generations,” she says. “We could bring this model to other cities. You'd be highly sustainable. The amount of good that we could do in Austin I think would be incredible—just the sheer amount of sweat that's gone into this project. I want people to know it's very raw, and it's very real, and it took a lot of heart to try this.”

To learn more about Heartening, visit their website at Heartening.org or find them on Instagram @hearteningaustin, where Kelley posts frequently about ways to be more sustainable with your giving in your community.