The mission of the Chicago Furniture Bank is to provide dignity, stability, and comfort to Chicagoans that face poverty by allowing clients to handpick an entire home's worth of furniture.
"The Chicago Furniture Bank’s principals are three recent graduates from the University of Pennsylvania: Griffin Amdur, James McPhail, and Andrew Witherspoon. Amdur says the idea for the enterprise came from a conversation with his father about antique furniture. 'We were talking about how this stuff had a lot of value back in the day and now it’s basically worthless. We started discussing the secondary market for used furniture and saw there wasn’t much monetary value for used furniture but there’s still intrinsic use, and how much is wasted. Furniture is the least recycled product in the U.S.'
Amdur, then a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, began thinking there must be a way to bring that unwanted furniture to the people who needed it most. 'Penn had this prize which gives three senior nonprofit projects seed funding and I thought this was a good idea and an opportunity to do a lot of good and help a lot of people.'
So Amdur and fellow Penn students Witherspoon and McPhail developed a proposal for a furniture bank where people in need could get an entire apartment’s worth of furniture for $50. They won the prize, and with the award money, started operating out of a West Side warehouse in August. Not long after, the trio furnished their first client’s home – and in the early days, they did all the heavy lifting themselves.
Just a few months later, the bank has furnished more than 230 homes. The organization partners with social service agencies, which bring clients to hand-pick furniture from the 6,000-square-foot showroom. According to Witherspoon, the bank’s partner organizations serve victims of domestic violence, the formerly homeless, mentally and physically disabled individuals, and those facing poverty."
As of April 2022, the Chicago Furniture Bank has furnished 8,309 homes for over 18,906 people and given away furniture weighing over 5,000 tons. CFB believes that everyone deserves the comfort, dignity, and stability of
a fully furnished home.
Source: Erica Gunderson, New Nonprofit Gives Old Furniture – and People – Second Chances, WTTW, January 2, 2019