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POSTED AT 10:53 PM ON Aug. 30, 2011  (UPDATED AT 10:54 PM ON Aug. 30, 2011)

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The School of Public and Environmental Affairs is partnering with charity Good360 to investigate how unsold, donated items influence nonprofit organizations, showing collaboration in sustainability and philanthropy.

Through research, the pair aims to quantify the effects of donations, Diane Henshel, an associate professor in SPEA said.

According to a press release, those involved in the research have thus far “focused on evaluating the effects of community nonprofit Framing Hope, a partnership between Good360 and The Home Depot Foundation in which unsold merchandise from Home Depot stores is donated to participating nonprofit organizations.”

Good360 “solicit(s) product donations from corporations and distribute(s) them to tens of thousands of qualified nonprofits in its network” to carry out its product philanthropy, Kara Kozimor, Good360’s director of communications, said in an email.  

“Product donations that help charities fulfill their mission are a way for them to stretch their budget,” Kozimor said. 

SPEA’s collaborators then measure the influence of these donations specifically based on how much they help users, how the nonprofits benefit from them and the effects on environmental sustainability.

“(Good360 is) very interested in seeing what the implications are from a very widespread perspective, and that’s why we have people looking at it from all these different perspectives,” Henshel said.

Her capstone class of master’s students has focused primarily on the “sustainability implications,” she said.

They have been working on identifying the extent to which donations have kept unsold products out of landfills, she said.

This includes the quantity of donations, associated costs and the financial effect on the people who receive donated products.

This research deals with the emerging field of green philanthropy, or the ways people or businesses give to nonprofits with sustainability in mind.

“(It’s) how people or businesses give with environmentally sustainable purposes or outcomes,” SPEA nonprofit management professor Beth Gazley said in an email. “Here we are looking at both the business case and the environmental case for businesses like Home Depot that make in-kind gifts,” she said. “Eventually, our research will be useful to make the case that all kinds of giving, cash and in-kind, have environmental purposes.”

Gazley said after a year of collaboration, there are no solid long-term statistics that measure a difference between Home Depot’s products being sent to nonprofits rather than to landfills.

“I believe the most beneficial aspect of the project for Good360 is the documentation and research that will build the business case behind product philanthropy and explain the leveraged value of product giving,” Kozimor said.