Donate goods for the greater good
Portland firm recycles used items, puts dough in taxpayers’ hands
Jonathan House / Pamplin Media Group
Lorca Harrison of DoughNation Services packs Shirley Possehl’s unwanted dinnerware that will be donated to charity.
Shirley Possehl’s late husband was a bit of a pack rat.
“My husband had saved a lot of things all of his life,” Shirley says, nine months after Edgar Possehl died. “It was very difficult for him to let go of things.”
But when the couple needed to move last year from their large house on Mount Scott to a smaller manufactured home in Milwaukie, dealing with all those things became a big headache.
And that’s what led Shirley Possehl to a local business that appears to be one of the few — if not the only one — like it in the nation.
The business, DoughNation Services, helps people give away their stuff — right down to the sorting, stacking and trucking away — instead of consigning it to the landfill. Just as important, DoughNation also documents the donations so that customers get a tax break.
It worked so well that Shirley used DoughNation again after her husband died on New Year’s Eve last year.
“Everything is finding a home,” she says of the work DoughNation has done. “I feel good about that.”
Portlander Kim Breas founded DoughNation in 2002, after she left an executive position at an Internet company, cashed in some stock options, and was looking to get rid of a number of silk suits.
Workers at the charity where she donated the suits told her about software that could help her place a value on them; nonprofits aren’t allowed to put a value on donations they receive themselves because the Internal Revenue Service considers that a conflict of interest.
When she consulted that software, Breas says, “my tax deduction … was about five times what I would have guessed, left to my own devices. And a light bulb went off over my head.”
Maybe there’s a business in this, she thought.
But DoughNation Services really started taking off in 2005, when former real estate agent Lorca Harrison became Breas’ business partner.
“I’m basically an idea person,” Breas says. “But she’s grounded; I’m not. Basically she has to say: ‘Down girl. Stay focused.’ ”
DoughNation has ended up serving three broad categories of customers.
The first is people who just need to find the floor of their garage — those who need to get rid of unneeded stuff.
The second is what Breas and Harrison call “liberation” people — those who want to significantly downsize their possessions, sometimes because they’re older and are moving from a large house to an apartment.
The third is “gentle disposition” folks — customers who need help in emptying the house of a family member who has died.
A major part of DoughNation’s success stems from Breas’ insight about those silk suits: Most people don’t do well at documenting what they give away.
“Most people hugely undervalue what they can claim,” Breas says.
People often value their donated goods, such as clothes, at the dollar or two they might ask for them at a yard sale.
But the IRS says items donated in “good or better” condition can be valued at what a customer would pay for them in a secondhand store, Breas says — a much higher figure.
Which means that customers often can recoup their money — and then some — on DoughNation’s fees through their tax deductions. (A sample DoughNation fee: a small vanload of eight bags of clothing and household goods would cost $225.)
“The clients usually make at least half again what they pay us,” Breas says.
But the underlying value in the service is that DoughNation has good connections with local charities and nonprofits and works to find a way to reuse items that a person might otherwise send to the landfill.
“We put a lot of emphasis on making use of everything,” Breas says. “There’s not that much that we end up having to send to the dump. And that’s something we’re very proud of.”
Contact Doughnation at 503-320-8213, or on the Web at www.doughnationservices.com.