Sharing Connections Furniture Bank

Sharing Connections is a way for us to share with others, and
receive the benefit of knowing we are impacting the lives of people in our community in their time of need.
~Leeanne McGrath, Founder

Our Vision:

Through individualized and respectful care, we will ensure that everyone eats at a table and sleeps in a bed. Everyone wanting to make a home can. Everyone wanting to help will. Everyone involved takes away something good.

Our Mission:

Sharing Connections encourages self-sufficiency for our clients while preserving their dignity and providing them hope. Our primary business is to collect and distribute furniture and other basic necessities to make a home for families and individuals in need. Sharing Connections further provides community education and networking opportunities in the support of our primary business. Through respectful interaction with partners in the community and our belief in the goodness of people, we help others.

Why We Exist:

Each day in Metropolitan Chicago, families sleep on the floor, use their couch as a table, store food in a cooler, and put babies to bed in a cardboard box. There are also many Chicago-area families that have an abundance of household items. Sharing Connections is the link between these two groups. At Sharing Connections, a 501c3 non-profit organization, we accept donations of gently used furniture, household items and more, and redistribute these to families living at or below the federal poverty standards.

The approximately 330 people that come to Sharing Connections each month are referred to us by other nonprofit social service agencies. These families, our clients, live mainly in DuPage County, Aurora, and Metropolitan Chicago. Most of our clients earn less than $11,000 a year, and more than 50% of our clients are children. Our families struggle with many difficult obstacles in their lives like unemployment, domestic violence, health problems, and crisis like fires or floods. They come to Sharing Connections to pick up furniture for their homes to make their lives more comfortable, and to help them stay on the road of self-sufficiency.

The need for Sharing Connections’ services is great. Roughly 310 families are on our furniture waiting list wanting items like beds, tables and chairs, and sofas because they either have no furniture or their current items are in bad condition. Sharing Connections exists to make sure these families have the furniture they need to make their environment a comfortable place they are proud to call home.