Last Mile Home

Strong Backs and Community Spirit Deliver the Goods

By Maggie Fox

Anyone who has ever moved between homes knows just how difficult it is. Furniture is heavy and bulky, boxes don’t always fit in the back of cars, and stairs seem to appear out of nowhere.

Imagine how much harder it is for those of us who don’t have cars, who don’t have the cash to pay a moving company and whose friends are too tied up to help.

Imagine knowing that a roomful of donated furniture and appliances is waiting for you, but you have no way to get it home. It’s a problem for close to half the clients served by A Wider Circle.

“Transportation is, we know, the number one barrier for our clients,” says Allie Imhoff, Director of Essential Support at A Wider Circle.

Some days, more than 40% of clients scheduled to pick up furniture or other donated items fail to show up, says Eddy Ameen, Chief Program Officer for A Wider Circle.

“Some families would continue to yearn for furniture and have no way to get it into their home,” says Ameen. “We would watch families schedule and reschedule and reschedule.” Some didn’t have cars or couldn’t drive, while others did not have the physical capacity to unload their new furniture or other items once they got it home. Many lacked the social safety net of friends, relatives or kind neighbors to reliably help.

The solution came, as so many do, through a series of connections.

Ali Husanov had been frustrated when he saw time and again that people who contracted his Name Your Price moving service were leaving behind perfectly good furniture. He found A Wider Circle after looking for worthwhile places to donate.

“They do an important thing. If somebody wants to throw away furniture that looks perfect, we tell them they can donate to A Wider Circle.” And Husanov was willing to deliver many of those donations rather than see them go into landfills.

Items ready to be loaded for a delivery as part of the Last Mile Home project.

“We just wanted to be involved in the local community.”

Soon, the Rockville-based moving company was contracting to deliver to A Wider Circle clients, and also donating the occasional free-of-charge delivery day.

“We just got more involved and more involved. We just wanted to be involved in the local community,” says Husanov.

And staff at A Wider Circle were looking for ways to get donations to clients more reliably. Donors often ask about the trucks painted distinctly with A Wider Circle’s logo, but Imhoff says they’re heavily used for picking up donations, not for deliveries to families in need of the furniture.

“We tried doing once-a-month deliveries with our team,” she says. “But we have such a high demand of clients coming into our center, we need inventory. We have to prioritize picking up furniture.”

One obvious answer was a contract with a delivery service. So, A Wider Circle wrote a grant proposal and won backing for a pilot project.

“We got this grant which we called Last Mile Home,” says Ameen. “The funder was really concerned about families that just had no other way.”

Name Your Price was the obvious choice for where to spend the money, said Ameen. “Once we had this grant, we said Name Your Price is already kind of fulfilling this in a way, so why not contract with them for a consistent cadence?”

Once a month, Name Your Price fills its truck with deliveries for between two and six families living in the area. Husanov says he tries to provide services at cost.

The few families that A Wider Circle selects for delivery have several barriers to receiving delivery and have been unable to bring a vehicle to their appointment.

“They go above and beyond what is in the contract for us,” says Imhoff. “One day we had a whole delivery planned and we had a last minute addition for a client out in Baltimore.” But the client’s ride had abandoned her at A Wider Circle with no way to get herself home, let alone take any furniture with her.

“They thought she was taking too long and they just left her here,” says Imhoff. A Wider Circle sent the client home in an Uber and the next day, Name Your Price got her furniture to her.

It’s a pilot project for now, but Imhoff and Ameen hope they can attract other moving companies to take part.

“Taking away that pressure by bringing in moving services at zero cost to the client, that’s like white glove service to us,” says Ameen.

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Inspired to help? If you are a moving company that would like to support this work, or if you are a donor who would like to support neighbors’ “last mile home”, please reach out to development@awidercircle.org.

Maggie Fox is a journalist and volunteer with A Wider Circle.