Eugene weekly., August 25, 2016, Page 14, Image 14

TERRY MCDONALD AT ST. VINCENT DE PAUL'S NEW HOUSING DEVELOPMENT IN JUNCTION CITY
“I fell in love with the nonprofit world,” he says.
It was here, working in the local chapter of a Catholic
charity originally founded in Paris in 1833, that McDonald
discovered an outlet for his talents as well as a way to address
his concerns for the dispossessed of society. “If there’s a
need and nobody’s filling it, somebody has to,” he says.
“Unfortunately we’re not running out of people to help.”
Of specific interest to McDonald was the rather
unromantic task of figuring out how to “peel the waste
stream, kind of a sector at a time” — in other words, digging
into every kind of garbage and discovering a renewed value
for it. Not only that, but figuring out ever-new ways to
package and market the stuff.
“Nothing can have value without being an object of
utility,” Karl Marx observed, and here it might be fruitful
to point out that this grandpappy of capitalist critique was
actually rather in awe of capitalism, which he admired for
its dynamic ability to reach into every nook and cranny of
the social fabric. McDonald’s approach to salvaging waste
provides a rather beguiling twist on Marx’s observations
about our economic system. In short, McDonald finds utility
in exactly those objects most of us deem to be utterly lacking
in use, and he finds value in those places where value seems
to have fled.
“You start looking at the waste stream differently than
you used to,” he says of taking an entrepreneurial approach
to other people’s garbage. Where corporations eternally
seek spanking-new products to package and peddle in the
ceaseless flow of consumer goods, McDonald enters the
game at exactly the point where planned obsolescence
renders those consumer goods pointless.
In this way, SVdP has expanded into unforeseen markets
of opportunity: creating skateboard wax from used candles,
turning busted-out trailer parks into low-income housing
complexes, upcycling used mattress stuffing into new
dog beds, establishing a glass foundry, carving used vinyl
records into designer earrings, and on and on. The idea is not
to re-sell junk but to recreate it as a viable retail item.
“The point in all of this is you build these little businesses
on top of each other,” McDonald explains. It’s all about
positioning, he says; like any business, and unlike most
nonprofits, you create markets by discovering new products
and putting yourself in a position to provide those products.
Capitalism is an octopus, a multi-tentacled beast of supply
and demand and visa versa, and McDonald plays the game
as well as anyone, Starbucks-style, expanding into wider
and wider spheres of influence.
“You continue, building off businesses,” he says.
Obviously, these businesses generate a retail profit that is
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channeled back into social services, but they also help by
tapping into another natural resource, often underused: human
beings. “All of these things create jobs — 15 stores and a
bunch of these little businesses and close to 600 employees.”
Along with the 15 retail outlets, St. Vinnie’s has
warehouses scattered around Lane County — totaling some
200,000 square feet of space, with another 50,000 square
feet of warehousing in California. Such holdings reveal the
reach of this local chapter of a worldwide organization that
McDonald is revolutionizing in its approach to helping the
poor.
HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL
There are so many great Terry McDonald stories. Folks
who work with the guy are fond of relating anecdotes, equal
parts respectful and humorous, about his gritty work ethic
and his willingness to get down in the trenches and grab the
proverbial shovel. I’ve heard tell of McDonald launching
himself into one of those huge crates in order to start
unloading the books at the bottom.
“If you want to find Terry you’re going to find him on the
book line, because he’s sorting books,” says SVdP's director
of economic development Sue Palmer, a former Register-
Guard reporter who covered McDonald during her days at
the paper. “That engenders not only loyalty but a feeling
that we’re all in this together, doing this great work. His
willingness to take part feeds the soul of the organization.”
Palmer says she’s seen McDonald sit in a meeting for an
hour and simply listen to the conversation among his staff.
“He’ll let people exhaust themselves talking,” she says,
after which he’ll distill what he’s heard and cut to the chase,
usually with some immediate plan of action.
“He’s a no-bullshit guy,” Palmer says. “If you want to
know what’s really going on, Terry will tell you.”
That’s been my experience too, in the handful of times
over the past couple months that I’ve interviewed and tagged
along with McDonald: No bullshit. In fact, some of the best
stories I’ve heard about McDonald are told by McDonald
himself.
One of my favorites, then: With two facilities in California
and one here Eugene, St. Vinnie’s of Lane County has
become internationally recognized for its mattress recycling
program, which McDonald helped establish as the first such
commercial operation of its kind. Altogether, SVdP recycles
more than 170,000 mattresses and box springs every year,
and in 2013 alone the organization salvaged some 9 million
pounds of trashed beds from landfills around the country.
Of course, deciding to recycle mattresses is all well and
good, but figuring out how to take apart used beds proved
a bit arduous. To this end, McDonald first purchased a
shredder and tried shoving the mattresses through as is. It
worked well enough, he says, but they couldn’t separate
the materials afterward. “We’re gonna filet these things like
they’re a fish,” was his next impulse, and to this end the
recycling team employed a water knife, which used a high-
pressure water jet to cut through materials like a laser.
“Didn’t work,” McDonald recalls, after which they went
at it with an air knife. “Ditto,” he says. “Then we tried a
plasma torch. Lots of smoke and fire. Bad idea.”
Same with a pneumatic grinder. “You can get some
amazing fires if you try that,” McDonald says, smiling.
“Then we tried a rotary cutter,” McDonald recalls.
“Fortunately, we didn’t cut anyone’s arm off.”
At one point in the process, McDonald realized he’d
burned through $250,000 trying to get it right. “It was an
absolute failure,” McDonald he says. “Sometimes the pain
is really extreme. Sometimes you just make a mistake. It
wasn’t for lack of trying. The pain often helps you learn.”
Finally, a simple box cutter was used to slice into the
mattresses. “That has worked very well,” McDonald says.
“We just toughed it out and figured out how to get to the
other side of it,” McDonald says of the eventual success of
the mattress recycling program — the first of its kind in the
U.S.
Such relentless and single-minded determination seems
more befitting of our early American captains of industry —
those monomaniacal oil magnates and railroad tycoons of
old — than the head of a modern nonprofit known primarily
for its thrift stores. “I tend to move along,” McDonald says.
Mergers and acquisitions, amalgamation and capital:
This, then, is the process by which St. Vinnie’s seeks to
reroute resources back to society’s most disenfranchised
and underserved — a sort of reverse profiteering that beats
the neoliberals at their own game. And this in a do-gooder
realm where, more often than not, you encounter the kind of
caterwauling and endless liberal pieties that focus more on
the suffering than the sufferer.
The recounting of the mattress story brings to mind
another image from the not-too-distant American past. In
McDonald’s words I can almost see Charlie Chaplin, that
lovable tramp from our first Great Depression, trying to
wrestle down a box spring as it flips him ass over teakettle
again and again. In McDonald’s hands, SVdP is turning
Chaplin’s slapstick of failure — a flailing fight for dignity
against the inhumane ravages of the industrial process —
into a success story worthy of Horatio Alger.
Just imagine what would happen if our political leaders
were as honest and confident about the pains it might take to
get us back on track — about the failures that lead to success.
BUSINESS AS UNUSUAL
“I would say that this organization learned that business
is business,” Palmer says of McDonald’s leadership at St.
Vincent de Paul. As head of SVdP’s Cascade Alliance, part
of Palmer’s job is to spread the gospel of entrepreneurship
and market expansion to nonprofits around the country —
a mark of just how successful the St. Vinnie’s model has
been in Lane County.
“It’s very difficult for them to understand that there’s
a social service side and a business side,” Palmer says of
bringing other nonprofits up to speed on the idea of running
their organizations with an eye on capital accumulation.
“Groups get the business confused with the mission,” she
adds.
Palmer, who at one point describes SVdP as “a giant
rolling ball of chaos,” says that the quality of nimbleness is
a huge part of what McDonald brings to the organization.
“It’s the art of the possible every day,” she says. “The
thing you thought you were doing today, you’re not doing
today.”
Paul Neville, another former Register-Guard reporter
whom McDonald brought on board to run PR, puts it this
way: “You learn that when Terry says, ‘You want to take a
ride?’ you say ‘yes.’ It’s going to be something interesting.”