By Brandi Clark Burton
Kelley Rytlewski Dives Heart-first into Reuse
More than five years ago, Kelley Rytlewski noticed still-usable items left near the trash chutes of her Austin apartment complex. She started collecting and redirecting items to local nonprofits. Then she compiled and posted donation guides in her building. The list grew into a database and then, with time on her hands during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, she used her coding skills to build a cheerful website. Heartening.org tracks and showcases where to donate over 1,200 different kinds of items in Austin.
“But truthfully,” Rytlewski confessed, “especially for larger donations often associated with life transitions, people don’t want to make multiple donation stops.”
So, Rytlewski made it easy: she offered to take everything, sort it and get it to the right places. Eventually, her living room was overflowing with other people’s discards, which was tolerable until combined with a devastating layoff in 2023. Rytlewski went from being a five-star-reviewed staff member of Twitter’s CEO Office to unemployed and deeply depressed.
“I needed something heartening,” she recalls. “I needed to witness something good in the world every day.”
She formed Heartening as an official entity and spent months searching for her first sorting site to test her concept. In January of 2024 she leased a tiny 390-square-foot space, lined it with discounted shelving from a closed supplement store, painted and transformed the space into Heartening – a community-driven redistribution hub.
After suffering the summer in the warehouse with a broken A/C, Rytlewski worked to secure a larger location near Airport and Lamar by Thanksgiving. She moved the shelves to their third life and opened the current sorting room and Heartening’s $3 Clothing Warehouse. As a New Year's gift to Austin she opened the Free Clothing Stand on January 1 of that year.
“As kind of a practical environmentalist, I thought the most impactful thing would be redirecting all this waste from the landfill,” Rytlewski reflects. “I now know that the magic of Heartening is interacting with enthusiastic volunteers, and watching people excitedly finding items they can use.”
Heartening is a sustainability project under the fiscal sponsorship of 501(c)3 nonprofit Keep Austin Neighborly. Heartening currently runs entirely on volunteer efforts – and a whole lot of love. For their contributions to community resilience, Heartening received a small City of Austin Food and Climate Equity grant, but Rytlewski still needs folks experienced with navigating funding opportunities to join her team.
