More than Mattresses. World Refugee Week Campaign leads to new partnership for IKEA Canada and FCJ Refugee Centre.
It started with World Refugee Week last June. Local organizations around the globe supporting refugees had posted on the NeedsList platform — the needs ranged from mattresses for newly arrived families in Toronto, to English tutors, to funds to support asylum seekers on the U.S. border. The NeedsList software matches specific nonprofit needs with companies who can help with donations of time, funding, or supplies. After circulating the list to multiple companies in the Toronto area, IKEA Canada was a perfect match for the mattresses.
“IKEA North York established a relationship with FCJ Refugee Centre about six years ago and has worked with their youth leadership program in the past. NeedsList helped bring the Centre’s need for mattresses to our attention,” said Melissa Mirowski, Country Sustainability Manager at IKEA Group.
A Win-Win Partnership: Sustainability by Giving Back to the Community
One of the core services that FCJ Refugee Centre provides is the transitional housing program for recently arrived women and their children. After moving out of the shelter, many of the FCJ residents are able to find affordable housing, but they cannot afford to buy a mattress.
“They sleep on the floor, with only a blanket, for many nights. NeedsList connected us to IKEA, who made our residents’ lives so much easier by giving them the most basic need: a mattress to sleep on in their new homes,” said Tsering Lhamo, Housing Coordinator at the FCJ Refugee Centre.
IKEA is a people and planet positive company, and they are committed to being a fully circular business by 2030. It turned out that each week, the North York IKEA store turned over about 5–7 gently-used mattresses from their displays. Partnering with FCJ was a win-win situation: these mattresses would literally be finding a new home where they were most needed.
To meet a growing social need and avoid the landfill, IKEA is exploring new ways of working and partnerships that will help them give new life to their products. They have previously worked with other organizations that brought local needs to their attention, and they leveraged their connections to meet those needs.
“NeedsList’s expertise in identifying needs and making those connections easy and efficient is a unique service, and it’s the first time IKEA Canada has collaborated with such an organization,” said Ms. Mirowski.
The Potential of Real-Time Matching Technology to Leverage Corporate Resources
This example of real-time matching hints at the larger potential to match corporate resources to specific nonprofit needs. While IKEA was already working with FCJ Refugee Centre, they didn’t know of their need for mattresses until it was posted on NeedsList Imagine how much more difficult it can be for local organizations without established partnerships to communicate their needs to companies that can offer resources? NeedsList’s software, matches needs and offers in real time, giving all organizations access not only to supplies, but ultimately to mutually beneficial long-term partnerships in their communities.
