Setting the table for future growth
Two years in the works, Furniture Bank’s facility includes showroom, mattress recycling
The commercial building on Mosely is swarming with people who are pitching in to help one of the city’s fast-growing charities.
Oli Mohammed, executive director of the Houston Furniture Bank, is on the move while workers break down old mattresses, trucks deliver gently used furniture and tradesmen work their magic inside and out.
It’s the furniture bank’s newest location, expected to open by the end of the month after two years of planning and work.
Mohammed pulls out his colorcoordinated floor plan and points out the front lobby for clients and a second entrance where the general public will buy new mattresses. There will be a showroom, storage, a receiving area, a mattress recycling room and an area for his DIVAS: Decorating Interiors — Volunteers at Your Service.
The DIVAS are local interior designers, architects and others who do the equivalent of home makeovers for special clients of the furniture bank’s partner agencies.
Usually, caseworkers identify a needy family deserving of special treatment, and the designers make over their home or apartment, often with new furnishings instead of the gently used items the furniture bank usually provides.
The Texas Gulf chapter of the American Society of Interior Designers is involved, and their vendors are generous with furniture and home accessories.
Sometimes they work on bigger projects, such as the Star of Hope, the YWCA, Helping a Hero or Haven of Hope.
Saima Seyar, of Elima Designs, is on the DIVAS team and is part of the buildout committee for the new facility.
“We don’t want clients to walk in and feel like it’s a charity,” Seyar said. “We want them to feel like they’re any person going to a store to buy furniture and be proud of where they are.”
Mohammed, a native of Bangladesh who has devoted his life to helping the poor, came to Houston after sev-
eral years of working with refugees in Kenya.
“I’m from Bangladesh, and poverty and people in need are not foreign to me,” Mohammed said. “But when I saw the way some people are living in America … I didn’t expect it to be that bad.”
He worked as a housing specialist with the Mental Health Mental Retardation Authority of Harris County and in 1992 set out to find furniture for those moving from mental health facilities into government-subsidized housing.
Inspired by project
It was a pilot project meant to serve 140 families. It worked, and within a few years, Mohammed proposed something with a broader reach: a furniture bank with partner agencies whose clients could all be served.
The partner agencies would buy vouchers and exchange them for gently used furniture for their clients. Just $250 to $300 worth of vouchers could buy the basics to fill a one-bedroom apartment: a place to sit, a place to sleep and a place to eat.
By 2003, the furniture bank had become an independent agency, a move made necessary by MHMRA budget cuts. All MHMRA could offer was warehouse space in exchange for furniture for its clients.
Mohammed and his nonprofit were living week to week when he heard that 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus would be in Houston for a lecture.
Yunus, a fellow Bengali, won the honor for his work founding the Grameen Bank and pioneering the concepts of social business and microcredit.
Mohammed asked his board of directors to join him at the lecture. They all left inspired to find new ways to not just stay afloat, but to thrive.
In 2008, they opened their first outlet center, which now generates about half of the furniture bank’s $500,000 annual budget.
It is open to the public as a thrift store with both new and gently used furniture. And it follows a social business model: its paying customers make it possible for Mohammed to provide for 1,500 families a year who cannot.
A year ago, the furniture bank’s previous warehouse was destroyed by arson. They lost everything in the building, as well as two delivery trucks. Insurance covered part of the cost of new trucks.
Hotels make donations
Furniture comes from individual donations, but also from local furniture stores handing off unsold goods. Hotels also give their old furniture, and Mohammed recently got several truckloads from a Marriott. Sofas, chairs and headboards were easy to use, though he’s not quite sure what to do with the large dresser-entertainment combos that are perfect in hotels but don’t quite work in people’s homes.
Mohammed sorts through what can be sold to the public and what is kept for needy families.
His goal is to serve 500 needy families a month within two years; he hopes to open more outlet stores in the area.
“When I look to the future, what we are doing right now is becoming a self-reliant and self-sustaining charitable organization. That is a unique achievement, I think,” Mohammed said. “Not many can claim that.”
Moving forward
Mohammed is full of ideas. Right now he’s in the middle of a mattressrecycling program that diverts thousands of old mattresses from our landfills.
With labor provided by 80 to 100 people a month working off court-ordered community service, mattress tops are removed, baled and sold to companies that recycle them into carpet backing. Just this year, the effort has brought in $83,000.
Some 600,000 mattresses go into Houston area landfills every year, Mohammed said. “That’s like filling up Reliant Stadium to the top, twice.”
The city has six covered drop-off sites for old mattresses that are trucked daily to the Houston Furniture Bank.
A $2.2 million grant from the city makes this project possible. It pays for trucks and balers and creates jobs.
New mattresses are on his mind, too. Some estimates are that 300,000 Houston-area children either sleep on the floor or share a bed every night. Mohammed is determined to get new mattresses to them.
He’s worked out a deal with Serta Mattress to be the Houston receiver of their “as-is” mattresses. For a small fee, he gets truckloads of mattresses. Other companies help, too; Mattress Firm and Mattresses for Less among them.
When the new facility opens, anyone can purchase good, low-cost mattresses
from the furniture bank.
He’s working on another idea with the Port of Houston and the Windham School District in Texas prisons. The port, he says, spends $1 million a year hauling away wood pallets. A better idea, he said, is to divert the wood to prison woodworking programs to be turned into furniture that the Houston Furniture Bank will sell or give to the needy.
“You save wood from
landfills, prisoners learn job skills and thousands of people get new furniture. In the process, the Port of Houston becomes the greenest port in the world,” Mohammed said.
“We don’t have the money for the trucks yet. Once we put that together, the Houston Furniture Bank will be on the top of all the local charities doing fantastic work.”