I spent my 67 minutes last week volunteering in my
favourite charity shop. The Pink Shop, sadly, is closing down at the end of August, and I went in to help sort stock for the grand sale.

They don't want to close down – the shop has been there for 20 years, but the building has been sold and the new owners have given the charity notice – pursuing classier tenants. An ugly side-effect of the
Groote Schuur district upgrade – the buildings get painted, rents go up, and poor people and charities get squeezed out.

The Pink Shop opened to raise funds for Aids sufferers. In those days Aids was still considered a "gay man's" disease, and sufferers were often ostracised. The Pink Shop was set up to support them financially, and to help with funerals – at one point it paid for three or four funeral per week.

Now, 20 years later, the needs of HIV sufferers have changed. So have the public’s donations. And the shop, like so many others, has been struggling. Running a charity shop isn’t for sissies. I’ve been watching "Mary Queen of Charity Shops", where retail guru Mary Portas, who usually turns around boutiques on her show, has turned her attention to a Save the Children shop in Kent.

She rushed in all gung ho, full of plans, and found fierce resistance from the team of elderly volunteers, some of whom have worked there for over 20 years, and who had firm ideas about doing things. She had to
learn to think with her heart as well as with her head, and I wish the developers in Main Road Mowbray were as eager to learn.

The jury is out on whether Portas’s intervention was successful or not. You can find an interesting discussion about whether charity shops should be tarted up to resemble high street boutiques, pay their staff, and charge higher prices, or if their charm lies in their musty untidiness, their volunteer staff and their bargain prices, at http://tinyurl.com/n88vws

Another charity in the Groote Schuur upgrade area is
Fountain House, a charity that helps people with mental illnesses to gain work skills so they can be rehabilitated into society. They’re running a small online auction, offering prizes like restaurant vouchers, brilliant wines, a very smart 2-seater couch, and a sewing machine, as well as weekends away at fancy hotels and spas. Find the auction logo in the top right-hand corner of their website: www. fountainhouse.org.za