Endorsements
The Toronto Star, Tuesday, December 7, 1999
“Generous local businessman has the right STUFF”
David Cooper sent along a poem recently. And while I liked it a lot - dealing as it did with the paradoxes of our time: More conveniences but less time, more knowledge but less wisdom, steep profits
but shallow relationships - I’m really more excited by his story.
Cooper runs a business on Queen St. W. that’s been in the family for almost 60 years. But he doesn’t want to talk about that. He doesn’t even want you to know what it does. (Office supplies.) He wants
to talk about STUFF.
STUFF stands for Supporting Today’s Underprivileged For the Future. It’s an initiative Cooper started three years ago.
But lately, he says, it’s taken off. And it has the 52 year old father of two awfully excited.
Back then, having taken stock, as most of us do, along life’s journey, Cooper decided he wanted to do something for the community.
So he began providing office furniture to registered not-for-profit charities. Throught this, he began to collect wish lists of what they needed; through business contacts, he learned what was
available. And STUFF was born to act as broker.
No money changes hands, but lots of merchandise now does - shoes, clothes, computers, office furniture, toiletries, appliances.
And with it, opportunity for recipients and the chance to make a difference (occasionally tax receipts) for donors.
Most of this has spread by word of mouth. Now Cooper gets about five calls a day from companies looking to donate goods or services.
Or say, from a doctor who’s retiring and might be looking to unload an examining bed. While Cooper’s company may not want it, he usually knows, because of STUF, a street clinic that does.
To continue David Cooper’s poetic theme of paradoxes, there’s real hope in STUFF’s potential, but real mystery - given the apparently simple and obvious brokering role it fills - that it should be
needed at all.
Evidently, in this age of fabled communications capacity, he’s discovered we have both willing donors and the desperately needy - and too few channels by which surplus meets demand.
“People are longing for community” he says. “They need a vehicle.”
By January, he hopes to have his own not-for-profit status, to hire a director and small staff and set them up in spare space in his building.
“The alliances that we’re making are businesses, but we’re going to start going after whole sectors, possibly creating virtual inventories, getting businesses to discover who the not-for-profit
businesses are.”
As he chatted, Cooper sat behind his desk, his necktie underscoring his motivating principle - a motif in which laughing children stand upon one another’s shoulders.
“Everybody wins here - the individual, a corporation, whoever’s giving ... But it’s more than that. I’ll give you and example. One not-for-profit takes in the computers, teaches the people that
they’re trying to help how to fix them, then how to use them.”
Astonishingly, or maybe not, Cooper uses in explaining his mission some of the very language the current Premier employs - offering “a hand up, rather than a hand out,” “breaking the cycle of poverty.”
Only to him and STUFF, it appears these are words to be backed by deeds, not mere Orwellian buzzphrases.
Still, it’s principles, not politics that interest Cooper. He knows what he’s not. “I’m very apolitical. I back away very quickly as soon as it gets political.”
And he knows what he is.
“If I’m not my brother’s keeper, who is? I am my brother’s keeper.”
Probably the greatest satisfactions in life are not, pleasant though they be, prosperity and prestige. The deepest and most durable comfort is to find, in the course of one’s days on the planet, a
little peace and purpose.
These days, David Cooper seems to have it.
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