“Heartening” our Community Hero Kelley this Valentine’s Day
No one embodies this Valentine’s season of love, community, and compassion better than Kelley Rytlewski. Kelley is a fellow Austinite and founder of Heartening, a project keeping secondhand resources within the Austin community by making them free and available to those experiencing economic instability. Heartening’s mission also addresses the issue of textile waste by redistributing resources back into the community.
Heartening shows a beautiful example of circular living.
Circular living is a lifestyle approach which aims to decrease mass consumption in favor of mindful consumption with an emphasis on reusing, repairing, and upcycling secondhand items. Kelley started Heartening after being inspired from her own frustration with “the waste generated in our own community […] getting carelessly tossed for convenience.” Kelley’s belief is simple:
“we already have everything we need—we just need to share it.”
To facilitate sharing our excess within our own community, Kelley created a local search tool where you can search for any household item and find a local cause that has that item on their wishlist, ensuring any “trash” can become someone else’s treasure.
In addition to this public service, Kelley rents a warehouse where she accepts and sorts donations herself for redistribution. The project has grown and so has her space! Many items are sorted and given back to the community for free via the Free Clothing Stand or partner organizations.
Heartening offers a FREE CLOTHING STAND in North Austin and restocks it daily.
Ever since Organized For Good started following Kelley’s initiatives on social media last year, we had been hoping for a chance to get to know the person behind such an amazing cause. In December 2024, the City of Austin recognized Kelley as a “Net-Zero Hero” for her efforts in sustainability and community building. When we spoke with Kelley, it was immediately clear just how dedicated she is to her cause.
Kelley works every day of the week—let us say that again: every day of the week— to keep the cycle of giving going.
Heartening operates on a “shoestring budget” as Kelley manages the project behind-the-scenes and seeks funding from grants and sponsors. She opened the Free Stand the first week of January, and it’s quickly growing in popularity. We serve 30-50 people every day we are open (5 days/week ) and move 500-1,000 items daily, freely back to the community.
They cover their costs by selling some items for a very accessible price of $3 per item.
It’s incredible, unbelievable, and confounding for one person to behind all of what Heartening does for the community, yet Kelley’s devotion to the concept of circular living and her own community seem to fuel her fire (and thankfully draw volunteers to the cause, too).
Heartening was responsible for 100,000 secondhand garments being redistributed locally in 2024. This year, she’s aiming to triple that number.
Now, without any more accolades (although we could keep going), here is what Kelley shared with us:
We’ve seen your sorting warehouse on Instagram and we have to know: Do you identify as highly organized?
Ha, hardly! Truly, my focus is on efficiency. Organization is only one technique that can contribute toward greater efficiency. I believe any energy spent on organizing must pay off many times over in efficiency or it isn’t worth doing. At Heartening, our purpose is to flow garments back into the Austin community as cheaply and efficiently as possible. We intake and sort over 1,000 garments a day (5 days a week) so we organize to the extent that it helps neighbors find what they need as quickly as possible. We design our organizational systems so garments are touched as few times as possible by volunteers before they find their place and someone who will take and reuse them.
I feel joy when items are reused, repaired, reworn, reimagined, and remade.
I have always been deeply saddened by waste. As a child, I fixed my broken toys and learned to sew when I was six years old. I grew up wearing clothing my mother sewed or helped me to sew. I loved going to garage sales and thrifting for trinkets at little roadside stands or rusty antique shops deep in East Texas.
2. How do you manage your own wardrobe?
Daily, I nearly get buried alive in clothing, so I have a complicated relationship with it. I’ve worked for two years on Heartening without any salary from it, so I gave up shopping a long time ago.
The work at Heartening has taught me to acquire clothing slowly and hold clothing loosely. There is no item in my wardrobe that I would not give away. No garment or accessory is precious to me. Clothing is not a collection that I covet or curate.
Instead, I allow myself to take clothing from our mending pile, or stained items from the laundry bin, and repair/stain-soak and clean them. Many pieces we get have corporate logos embroidered on them, so once in a while I’ll take a seam ripper and carefully remove each embroidered thread to keep the garment for myself. Through that extra bit of effort, I feel like I earned them. It also acts like a barrier so I won’t bother taking a piece I don’t see as worth the extra effort. A similar barrier for someone else might be “for every item I acquire, I make myself give away two”.
3. What advice would you give to someone trapped in trends/fast-fashion cycles?
Google three phrases:
“Atacama Desert, Chile clothing dump”
“Dandora Dumpsite, Nairobi”
“Ghana shores clothing.”
Learn what the textile trade is and how Goodwill and the Salvation Army, among thousands of other thrift stores, participate in sending our waste to Kenya, Ghana, Chile, and other developing nations (in fact, these companies make a significant amount of money doing it).
If we continue to buy and discard clothes in the current average American habit, we must understand these channels will continue to shift the burden of our fashion waste to countries with the least capacity to deal with it.
This should make us each sad, then angry, and then motivated to make change.
4. What types of educational resources have been the most valuable in your journey with net-zero and circular living?
Volunteering is the single greatest source of my research. I volunteered running clothing closets for unhoused neighbors for an entire summer. Then I delivered donation bundles to over sixty local groups and toured each one, speaking with staff to learn about their struggles with in-kind donations, before I started Heartening’s Donation Sorting Room.
When you volunteer, you witness with your own eyes, move with your own hands, and participate in solutions to society’s challenges.
5. What is next for Heartening?
Our hopes and dreams right now amount to paying our bills and keeping our project in motion. We nearly shuttered the project in December of 2024.
Every day is a labor of love, exhausting yet heartwarming. We don’t have any grant funding yet in 2025 so I feel immense pressure to sustain our own operations.
We need to double sales in our $3 clothing warehouse if we hope to keep our project alive. For every $1 we receive, we are able to give away 3 garments for free in our free clothing stand and aim to give away over 300,000 garments for free this year — if we can keep operating.
6. How can people help Heartening achieve its mission?
Here are 5 ways you can help Heartening’s mission:
Follow our journey on Instagram (@hearteningaustin). This is the diary of our project and shows the history of our work.
We operate on a shoestring budget and can’t pay our rent in clothing, so a tax-deductible donation through our Open Collective is always appreciated.
We encourage everyone to browse our $3 warehouse and enjoy being surprised by the incredible brands and unique pieces we sell for only three bucks. Our address and hours are on Google Maps.
Sign up to volunteer with us. Shifts are 2-hours each and easy to jump in!
Drop off donations any time we are open. You are not required to hold an appointment anymore, but this link shows a detailed list of what we can accept (for the list, scroll down on the left-hand side of the Calendly page underneath the address)
Thank you, Kelley, for taking the time to speak with us at Organized For Good and for answering our questions! We will be supporting Heartening by routing our clients’ relevant donations to Kelley’s cause, by signing up for the occasional volunteer slot, and, of course, by browsing the store!
We hope to see y’all there, too!
If you’re interested in learning even more about Heartening, check out the City of Austin’s article and visit Heartening’s gorgeous, and extremely useful, website.
