Where hope starts to heal
About Us
Carry Me Home is a New England-based non-profit that is run 100% by volunteers. Our warehouse and free clothing shop is located in Brattleboro, Vermont.
Our Mission
Our primary mission is to support families and individuals fleeing zones of conflict. This includes local folks, as well as refugees and asylum seekers.
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We collect, sort, and donate weather-appropriate gently used children's and adult clothing, footwear and sleeping bags. We offer these for free to anyone in need, at our Free Shop at Centre Congregational Church in Brattleboro, Vermont. We previously focused on shipping clothes to partners working at refugee camps and on tribal lands, and still do so occasionally.
Working with Partners
Refugee resettlement and asylum seeker support in Southern Vermont are spearheaded by the Ethiopian Community Development Council and its Multicultural Community Center (ECDC), and by the Community Asylum Seekers Project (CASP). Support for local folks experiencing difficulties in life comes from a variety of nonprofits and social service agencies, including Groundworks Collaborative, Southeast Vermont Community Action (SEVCA), and Health Care Rehabilitation Services (HCRS). These organizations have paid staff and also work with a multitude of amazing volunteers. We at Carry Me Home do our best to complement their services by making our Free Shop an ongoing resource for all neighbors, new and old.
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Our shop is meant for anyone whose life circumstances have put them in need of dignified clothes and footwear at no cost. Please reach out to us if we can help you or someone you advocate for. We are glad to help people, even if they are not refugees, and even if they are not in Southern Vermont.
If you work with folks who would benefit from our free shop:
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Please make sure your clients or friends know about us and what we offer.
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Bring them to our free shop when they feel ready. They are also welcome to visit us unaccompanied.
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Shop hours: click the link above. The schedule has been translated into Dari, French, Haitian Creole, Pashto, and Spanish. Please encourage folks who have internet access to bookmark the page.
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We may cancel if we are short staffed, so please call ahead (802-355-2256).
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We are always glad to have more help with sorting, staffing the shop, and collecting needed items. Use the links at the top of this page to learn more.
Volunteering with us
We welcome you to help us sort donations, organize the shop, and help customers during Free Shop hours!
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We work at Centre Congregational Church in Brattleboro on Tuesday and Friday mornings; we also have Wednesday morning and Thursday afternoon hours by appointment and as needed.
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Email us to ask about volunteering or join our mailing list.
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We welcome school and community groups who want to organize clothing drives and work parties
- We also need help maintaining this website and our social media accounts, and doing our accounting (this can be done remotely).
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Our Process
We collect donations of gently used or new clothes and footwear at Centre Church during shop hours and by appointment, and at community collection boxes. Let us know if you want to organize a collection box or donation drive for us. We ask that everything be in great condition, so we can treat our shoppers with the dignity everyone deserves.
We are 100% volunteer run, funded and organized. Sorting is our biggest ongoing, never-ending task. Volunteers meet as needed to sort appropriate seasonal clothing by age/size and item. A well-organized system helps volunteers work effectively, and shoppers find what they need.
New donations need to be assessed, organized, and placed on display. Our display racks and shelves get messy over time and need their contents re-checked and folded or hung attractively. We pull items from storage to refill thin displays, and cull items that aren't "selling" from over-full displays. We cycle warm and cold weather items in and out of the shop with the seasons. We tote re-donations to Experienced Goods and textile recycling bins. And meanwhile we interact with our shoppers, making them feel welcome and helping them find what they need.
Community donations of used items typically look like this! It's always helpful if you pre-sort and label your items by type and size.
Sometime a generous donor makes or buys us new something we can't get enough of, such as winter mittens, or that we prefer new, such as underwear. (Tip: Ocean State Job Lot or Mr. G's Liquidation have the best prices on these in our local area!)
We open up the bags and boxes, and check everything. We set aside anything we can't use (these go to Experienced Goods or Yellow Bin/Textile Recycling if suitable). We label and sort items, and put them on display in the shop.
"Madame Chic" is our beloved shop mannequin. We give her a new outfit as the seasons change, or whenever there is something fabulous we want to highlight.
History and Impact
Carry Me Home's Warehouse and
Shipping Era
We were founded in 2015 by Vedrana Greatorex. Inga Plisz-Paluch became Director in 2016, followed by Alix Fedoruk in 2019. We were based on the stage in Memorial Hall, in the basement of Centre Congregational Church.
We sorted and packed mounds of donations, and sent shipments to Greece (Chios, Polikastro, Idomeni, Lesvos, Samos, and Athens); Croatia, Slovenia, and Serbia; and Calais, France. We closely coordinated with field volunteers on the ground who advised us as to current needs, and supervised the distribution of our goods to the people who needed them most. In our first four years of operation, we shipped over 12 tons (24,000 pounds or about 540 large shipping boxes) of presorted, packaged aid for refugees.
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A volunteer in France unboxing our shipment
Vedrana in 2016
Vedrana in 2016
Vedrana in 2016
Vedrana in 2016
Inga and Alix with boxes ready to ship
Boxes arriving, and refugees using a free shop, in Greece​
Since 2019, in addition to international shipments, we sent shipments of winter clothing to partners on tribal lands (Pine Ridge), and donated clothes regularly to local folks in need, including people experiencing homelessness, asylum seekers, and refugees.
Carry Me Home's Free Shop Era, 2022 onward
When formal refugee resettlement began in Southern Vermont in early 2022, Centre Congregational Church very generously cleaned out and repainted a larger space in their building that was more suitable for a shop, and offered it to us. We supplied "Arrival Kits" to ECDC for the nearly 100 Afghans who were the first to arrive, moved our shelves and racks into a more people-friendly arrangement in our new space, and our first shoppers came to Carry Me Home on January 8, 2022.
Ever since then, we have welcomed all comers to the Free Shop, where we process your donations, and do our best to make all our shoppers feel welcome and appreciated in our community. We are open for 2-3 hours, 3 times a week, and average about 10 shoppers/week. Recurring visitors might stop in for just one item, or a new seasonal wardrobe. New folks starting from scratch and trying to outfit a family might take as many bags as they can carry. Our shoppers are born Americans from Vermont and nearby, as well as new Americans from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Democratic Republic of Congo, Honduras, Venezuela, and more.
Trying to be kind to the Earth
If donated items are not appropriate for us, we give anything in good usable condition or with good upcycling potential to our local thrift shop, Experienced Goods. There is enough local need, and the shipping cost in both dollars and carbon, is high enough, that we have paused international shipping for now. We occasionally send excess winter clothes to our partners at Pine Ridge still, but are mindful to only send top-quality items that are worth the cost. Anything truly not usable, we donate to clothing collectors who state they are able to process torn and stained textiles.
Past Events
Prior to COVID, we hosted four annual Greek Supper fundraisers, in honor of the Greek people who have been the first to welcome so many people fleeing the Middle East by boat.
We look forward to another community supper some day!
Fundraisers
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House Blend shared their beautiful a cappella voices with us for a lovely coffeehouse concert in the parlor at Centre Church.
Education
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We co-sponsored film screenings about refugees and the places they travel from and through.
How to Give
Give your time:
Our biggest need right now in Summer 2025 is for volunteers to help us sort our donations, keep them organized as we welcome customers, and maintain our website and social media.
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Give new or gently used clothing:
We maintain a list of most-needed items, and where to drop them off, here:
Make a monetary donation:
We use your monetary donations to purchase:
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Items our neighbors need that we aren't able to get enough of by in-kind donations. For example, we have purchased winter boots in smaller men's sizes, new underwear, and long underwear for all ages.
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When we set up our free shop, we purchased some shelving units to complement the ones we were able to obtain by donation.
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We ship clothes and footwear in excellent condition that are not needed locally to partners at the Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation. Your donations cover USPS costs and our packing supplies.
Please click the button below to make a donation via Paypal, or make a check out to Carry Me Home and mail it to:
Carry Me Home
c/o Centre Congregational Church
193 Main St, Brattleboro, VT 05301
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