Bringing It Home
How a campus thrift shop keeps the community afloat
On the evening of November 7, 2025, local apartment complex Olympia Place caught fire. The emergency rapidly became a tragedy—Olympia Place housed more than two hundred students, most of whom attend UMass. The building was a total loss, and students’ housing and possessions were destroyed.
From clothes to coffee tables, the Olympia Place students had to start from scratch. The need was great, but so was the community support. Instantly, a huge influx of donations began arriving, and as the campus rushed to support those in need, those at the helm of the crisis response realized that a hub of sorting and distribution was needed.
Lucky for them, such a hub already existed. Those who have been on campus in the last decade likely know New2U as the start-of-semester thrift sale sourced from last year’s donated goods. A beacon of sustainability on campus since 2014, the organization recently expanded to a year-round store in Hampden Commons. It turns out that the brick-and-mortar shop arrived just in time, and within a few days, New2U went from the go-to place to find a cool new jacket to a ready-made system for addressing a crisis. After the Olympia Place fire, New2U staff went into overdrive, filling the back room—and, seemingly, any other available corner of the building—with overflowing donation bins.
“It happened very quickly. I’m still processing it,” says Eva Bergloff ’26, a sustainable community development major and the manager of New2U. The senior has been a part of New2U since the year-round space was still in the brainstorming phase. As a sustainability fellow in her junior year, Bergloff designed the business plan for New2U—now, she runs the shop.
“I really consider this my sacred space, and I want it to be a sacred space for other people, too,” Bergloff says. She speaks with the passion of someone with a strong purpose: shepherding the fledgling New2U through its first year of campus residence and serving her peers in a time of need.
As an illustrative anecdote: Before New2U even opened its doors, someone donated a large plush Charmander (an orange bipedal Pokémon lizard with a flaming tail, for the unacquainted). “We were not selling it,” Bergloff relays. “It was our mascot.” This fall, a student patronizing the store asked if it was for sale. After Bergloff gave the habitual “no,” the student explained that they had lost an identical plush in the fire. Stunned, Bergloff told them to please take it. “It was almost a ritual handoff,” she says. “Like, ‘We've been waiting for you.’”
Though the day-to-day life of New2U has changed dramatically to accommodate the rapid response to the fire, the sustainability roots of the project have kept it strong.
“Dedicating physical space to the New2U program has allowed us to respond to a crisis in a way that was very fast and effective,” explains Laurie Simmons, assistant campus sustainability manager and one of the staff members who leads the program. “I think it's an example of how sustainability programs improve the resiliency of not just the campus community but the entire community.”
As the acute phase of the crisis wanes, New2U is settling back into regular life. Folks are stopping by to dig through racks of clothes for that cool new jacket. Proceeds from store sales circle back to cover overhead costs and pay student workers. Last year’s dorm decor is finding a new wall to adorn, rescued from the landfill. And above all, students are receiving the support at the core of New2U.
“Coming to college is a really expensive thing and being able to get what you need in a convenient and accessible and inexpensive way is huge,” says Simmons.
For Bergloff, it all comes down to building community. “We need people to be there for each other and provide for each other,” she says. And as the response to the Olympia Place fires showed, this is a community that’s eager to do just that.
