KINGSTON, R.I. – April 30, 2025 – A project two and a half years in the making finally comes to fruition this weekend as Rhody Repurpose aims to collect unneeded and slightly used items from students moving out of residence halls and donate them to those in need.

Launched by University of Rhode Island senior and Thomaston, Connecticut, native Kiersten Sundell, president of URI’s Student Action for Sustainability club, Rhody Repurpose is a unique initiative in which students living on campus this semester can drop off unwanted items during the spring move-out period between Saturday, May 3, and Friday, May 9, at a PODS storage container outside of Garrahy and Wiley halls.

Anything from half-used bottles of laundry detergent and gently worn clothing to larger items such as plastic drawer carts for storage and mirrors can be donated.

Collected items will be listed in real time on social media through Rhody Repurpose’s Facebook group, allowing community members to pick up whatever they’d like on campus during the seven-day collection period. Student volunteers will be on hand each day between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. to accept, sort, and distribute the items.

Students moving out in the spring but will be returning to campus next fall are also free to take items donated by other students and repurpose them for the following semester. After May 9, the remaining items will be stored at the University’s basic needs pantry, the Rhody Outpost – which is open throughout the summer – or donated to Big Brothers Big Sisters of Rhode Island. Big Brothers Big Sisters will accept “any items that can be lifted by a single person,” which includes furniture, unopened food items, and textiles such as blankets, towels, and sheets, among others.

“This has been a long time coming,” said Sundell, “but this was the year we finally sat down and got it done.”

“In addition to the sustainability aspect, this project is so important because the items being donated, whether it’s an unopened pocket of Ramen or a small bottle of detergent, will make a big difference to our international students or a student living on or around campus during the summer,” said Barbera Sweeney, URI’s Food Security Outreach coordinator. 

Sundell first came up with the idea of a repurpose project as a freshman after watching students toss away perfectly good items at the end of the year because they either couldn’t bring them home for the summer or didn’t know how or where to donate them.

“If you looked in the dumpsters you would see things like a plastic shelving unit, for example, which is really popular in freshman dorms,” Sundell said, “but they would throw it in there and it would crack. Now you can’t use it.

“With Rhody Repurpose, we’ve created a resource where students and people within the community can search online and find items they need and where students can donate whatever they don’t want so that someone else can put it to good use.”

A triple major in environmental science and management, political science, and wildlife and conservation biology at URI, Sundell has always been passionate about sustainability and raising awareness about environmental issues, inspired as a teenager by renowned environmental activist Greta Thunberg.

As a junior, Sundell helped revive the Student Action for Sustainability club, which had been dormant for several years, and in 2023 traveled to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, to advocate for clean energy at the United Nations Climate Change Conference. She interned for Generation Atomic, a grass-roots organization that advocates for greater use of nuclear energy; worked on projects for the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency; and has also visited 13 national parks, mostly during spring break the past three years.

With the Student Action for Sustainability club expanding to 15 members by her senior year, Sundell researched similar projects at other colleges and universities and began developing the proposal for Rhody Repurpose. She also enlisted help from Housing and Residential Life; Dining Services, which secured sustainability funds to reserve the storage unit; Rhody Outpost; key administrative figures; and academic colleges to push it across the finish line. She credits fellow club members Nick Powers, also a senior, and current undergraduaes Amelia Franklin, Mekenna Cox, incoming president Kate Stanwood, and incoming vice president Lizzie Welch for their help with making Rhody Repurpose a reality just in time for the end of the semester.

This year’s pilot run will help returning members of Student Action for Sustainability further improve the project’s reach and effectiveness in 2026. Sundell, who is moving to California to participate in NASA’s eight-week Student Airborne Research Program after graduating, hopes to see Rhody Repurpose expand to include more storage units, more student volunteers, and eventually permanent storage on campus so students and community members can pick up items year-round.

“I have no doubt it’ll continue to grow and be bigger and better next year,” Sundell said. “Our goal at Student Action for Sustainability was to leave things better than we found them. It didn’t matter who was involved, who started it, or who worked on it. We just wanted to find something we could really invest in and spend every second working on so we could see it come to light. It’s amazing to see this finally happen.”

Michael Parente, director of communications and marketing in the URI Division of Student Affairs, wrote this news release.