Donate goods for the greater good

Portland firm recycles used items, puts dough in taxpayers’ hands

By Todd Murphy

Pamplin Media Group, Sep 11, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Jonathan House / Pamplin Media Group

Lorca Harrison of DoughNation Services packs Shirley Possehl’s unwanted dinnerware that will be donated to charity.

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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.

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