C I T I Z E N
N O WA S T E G O E S T O WA S T E O N T E R R Y M C D O N A L D ' S WAT C H
T E R RY
BY RICK LEVIN
S
tanding in a cavernous St. Vincent
de Paul warehouse on Chad Drive,
executive director Terry McDonald
and I survey stacks upon stacks of
identical cardboard boxes, each one
the size of a watermelon crate. It’s
quite a sight. The stacks tower toward
the ceiling and stretch horizontally
wall to wall, and their Lego-like
arrangement creates the shadowy alleys of a deserted city
at sundown.
All told, the boxes contain more than one million
pounds of used books.
McDonald tells me matter-of-factly that St. Vinnie’s
receives about 30,000 pounds of books a day. The
discarded books are sorted and priced and placed and sold,
each one turned for a small profit that eventually circles
back as some form of help for the community’s needful —
as housing, clothing, food, jobs.
A forklift whizzes past. Over at the sorting station, two
women are busy scanning the endless river of literature
that pours forth, dumpster-style, onto a conveyor belt. It’s
the best dream Henry Ford never had: turning industrial
mechanization into assembly-line philanthropy.
In just this way, McDonald says, St. Vincent de Paul
of Lane County processes, on average, around 25,000
pounds of books a day — sorting, pricing, getting them
on the shelves.
I do some quick math (30,000 in, 25,000 out) and
point out that, eventually, McDonald will find himself
completely swamped by used books. “Yeah,” he says. “I’m
going to have to start working a little harder.” He pauses a
moment, then adds: “It’s a great problem to have.”
This, then, offers a clue to the exhaustive approach
McDonald has taken toward running St. Vincent de Paul
(SVdP) for the past three decades: It’s a great problem to
have, and I’m going to have to start working a little harder.
Specifically, McDonald looks at the Sisyphean
mountains of garbage piling up in our consumer society
— discarded appliances, ratty mattresses, tattered clothing,
all that crap typically tossed into the dump — and he sees
nothing but opportunity.
In McDonald’s world, no waste goes to waste — not
even the mite dust that falls from recycled mattresses,
which St. Vinnie’s bags up and ships to a company in
Washington ($110 a pound) to be converted into allergy
test kits. At one point, McDonald admits, “I was saving
human hair” in the hopes of finding a use for it.
PLAY THE GAME
Under the leadership of Terry McDonald, St. Vincent de
Paul has become a veritable powerhouse of benevolence
throughout Lane County. The list of the organization’s
contributions are staggering when you stack them together:
more than 1,100 units of affordable housing, including
a townhouse complex of 40 units that just opened in
Junction City; emergency services ranging from rent and
utility help to donations of food, medication and clothing;
homeless services including the Egan Warming Center
and the Eugene Service Station; vocational rehabilitation
and help to veterans; actual manufacturing, including a
glass foundry, mattress recycling and, yes, the creation of
upcycled retail fashion. Then there’s all those St. Vinnie’s
thrift stores seemingly everywhere, with book selections
that rival most used bookstores.
In its 2015 annual report, St. Vincent de Paul of Lane
County’s total assets — land, buildings, cash, equipment,
etc. — are listed at more than $72.6 million, up from $58.9
million the year before. Total revenues were $32.5 million,
up from just under $25.5 the year before, with retail earnings
alone at $16 million. And the money flowing back to the
community in 2015 totaled nearly $30 million in services
(up from $26.2 million in 2014), with more than $7 million
going to housing alone.
Such growth would be noteworthy in any corporation,
much less a nonprofit whose sole mission, as listed on its tax
returns, is to “provide assistance to the needy.”
“We take a very entrepreneurial approach to things,”
McDonald says. “We treat this as a business. We treat
our people in need as our stockholders. Business needs to
provide dividends. It’s basically a full-circle economy.”
No corporate CEO or Wall Street banker ever spoke
more frankly about the need to maximize profits through
growth, expansion and renewed investments. In this
instance, however, the relentless progress and profiteering
of the machine is being diverted downward, right at its
sweet spot, back to the people at the bottom of the food
chain. In this world of one-percenters amassing more and
more dividends at the tippy-top of the economic pyramid,
such a radical redistribution of wealth is what disingenuous
politicians, with varying levels of star-spangled failure, have
been promising for years now.
“I don’t get involved in politics,” McDonald tells me. “I
do get involved with how you’re going to deal with capital
and how you’re going to get involved with resources for the
benefit of the community. I can only do so much. What you
can’t do is ignore the fact that this is going on,” he adds,
noting that, over the past 25 years or so, more and more
people in this country have been shoved down from the
“robust middle” into poverty.
“The best you can do is change who holds the capital and
protect assets for the benefit of the many,” McDonald adds.
“I have been cheerfully trying to find as many ways as I can
to create a capital base that can be used for a social good, as
fast as I can.”
Hearing anyone, much less the head of a nonprofit, speak
so frankly about capital is unusual these days, and refreshing.
Capitalism has become such a loaded word — less a simple
designation than a linguistic cudgel synonymous with abuse
and corruption. And since we’re speaking of capitalism, why
not just say it? Terry McDonald is an unrepentant capitalist.
I mean that with all due respect. His take on economic
redistribution reminds me that capitalism is not a political
system but an economic one, and that there is nothing good
or bad but thinking makes it such. Thinking, and acting.
Rather than struggling against the imperial impulse
of capitalism and bemoaning its juggernaut of harm,
McDonald is turning it into a boon. And St. Vinnie’s does
this by positioning itself like a grease trap at the bottom
of the free market deep-fry, ready to capture all the runoff
nobody seems to want. This is trickle-down economics at its
finest — garbage into gold.
CAPITALIST JUNK MAN
Waste is an unusual natural resource, if one can call it
natural at all. It’s certainly renewable. Dumps aren’t going
anywhere anytime soon. And McDonald seems to have a
particular genius for applying good old Yankee ingenuity
to the trash heap. In essence, he looks at the dump and
yells: “Thar’s gold in them thar hills.”
“I’m a second-generation junk man,” McDonald tells
me. McDonald’s father, Harold Colin “Mac” McDonald,
was the first director of SVdP in Lane County, working
there from 1955 until his death in 1984. Terry was brought
on board in ’71, taking over as executive director after his
father passed.
McDonald, who graduated from the University of
Oregon with degrees in history and political science, says
that what he really wanted to be when he grew up was a
Byzantine historian. But, as a young man lending a hand at
St. Vinnie’s while “trying to figure out what to do with my
life,” McDonald stumbled upon his true calling.
eugeneweekly.com • A ugust 25, 2016
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