Not everyone has cash to donate to important local causes and charities. But nearly everyone has too much stuff. And our community has so many needs.
“Everybody has stuff. In their attics and their garages. People have storage units full of stuff they don’t know what to do with,” said Lisa Detchman.
What Detchman and Detour Ministries want to do is turn all that stuff into money that works for good. Their spacious new downtown resale shop, cafe and kid zone, Boomerang, has joined the ranks of local thrift and consignment stores that funnel resale revenues to sister nonprofit agencies and efforts. Detchman said Boomerang aims to develop a system like that of charitable furniture reseller Divine Consign, which is a block up the street and has been making formal grants to local nonprofits for years.
Boomerang opened on Oct. 1 at 808 Main St. — in the huge space that used to be triple-decker antiques smorgasbord Old Town Antique Market. In December, it presented the Clark County Food Bank with a $900 check, which was one week’s worth of the store’s coffee proceeds, Detchman said.
Detchman said Boomerang is the brainchild of prominent downtown developer Ryan Hurley and his Detour Ministries, a nonprofit Christian organization that aims to create sustainable support for nonprofits and churches. Hurley bought the side-by-side 806 and 808 Main St. properties a few years back; currently, his highest-visibility project is redeveloping the former Sparks Furniture building a couple of blocks over. Hurley could not be reached for an interview last week.
Consignment is possible at Boomerang but donations are better, Detchman said. Antiques, collectibles, art, jewelry, furniture and other housewares and recreational equipment are all welcome. What’s not welcome is the kind of stuff you could donate directly to a homeless shelter or food pantry, such as clothing and bedding. Visit http://www.boomerangvancouver.com/ for more details on how it all works.
Detchman, who has a background in retail sales, performs diligent Internet comparison research on items for sale, she said — and then sets her own prices “just a little bit lower.” There’s no point in stuff sitting here looking nice, she said.
The shop does have a clean, pristine look — even the kids’ play area in back, where a moms group meets most Fridays at 10:30 a.m. Detchman said it’s nice for those moms and kids to have a place to play where nobody is telling them to hush up and calm down.
Towering above it all is a “treehouse” that you get to by climbing some easy stairs. The little house actually is sturdily situated on a mezzanine that’s halfway up the back wall of this high-ceilinged space; the tree below it is made of paper and metal ribbing and is entirely non-weight-bearing. Detchman said she was browsing the Grand Marketplace in Portland for deals when “this random and sort of scary and ugly tree” caught her eye. Or maybe it was the resident artificial leopard perched in the tree’s artificial canopy, she said. Either way, she knew it would make perfect cosmetic support for the treehouse and asked about the price.
Sixty-five, she was told. Detchman assumed a zero or two had been left out. Did that mean $650? Or $6,500?
No, she was assured: $65, period. So she took that tree — and leopard — to their new home on Main Street in Vancouver, where their new surroundings make them significantly less scary and ugly.
Detchman pays her baristas — one is her son — but said the store aims to operate almost entirely on volunteer labor. That’s another way it can perform some community service, she said. If there are handy folks out there with too much time on their hands, she said, she can probably find them projects at Boomerang — working on the donated merchandise or the place itself, she said.
She pointed out that the staff work station at the back of the store is all salvaged stuff: the countertop is used wood plank sitting atop a wall made out of 30 feet of corrugated metal barn roofing. It was all put together by residents of Freedom House, a residential Christian addiction-recovery program in Hazel Dell.
“Everything here is repurposed or reused in some way,” she said.
