As costs rise, community efforts are changing focus from waste reduction to affordability

HodgePodge Lodge looks like a typical thrift store, with shelves packed full of dishes, garden pots and hardware supplies.

Except here everything is free.

At the municipally run reuse centre in Strathcona County, Alta., residents donate items they no longer need, allowing others to take what they can use. The initiative began in 2017 as a way to keep goods out of the landfill, but as costs have risen, helping people save money has become just as important – and has fostered a strong community along the way.

“[Community members are] definitely needing to use the types of facilities like ours so that [they’re] not having to buy new stuff,” says Erin Wildeboer, manager of HodgePodge Lodge.

In a municipality of about 104,000 people, the Lodge recorded more than 177,000 visits from June 2025 to June 2026, Wildeboer says, with as many as 1,100 people coming through on its busiest days.

Caitlin Perry, senior manager of education and communications at Circular Innovation Council, a national non-profit that promotes the circular economy, says programs once framed around reducing waste are increasingly presented as ways to help people save money.

“The cost saving is really the ultimate driver of why people are participating in these types of initiatives,” Perry says.

Buying secondhand, repairing, borrowing and swapping can also bring people together, she says, giving them a chance to meet and share skills.

At HodgePodge Lodge, about 160 volunteers help sort donations, stock shelves and keep the centre running. Teenagers completing community-service hours work alongside retirees, creating opportunities for different generations to learn from one another, Wildeboer says.

Cindy Camp, a retired occupational therapist, has volunteered at the Lodge since it opened in 2017. She has gotten to know the other regulars and even recruited her neighbour to join.

“It’s a whole community unto itself,” Camp says.

Volunteers also run a private Facebook group with 5,500 members, where people ask whether certain donations would be accepted and share projects made from things they found at the Lodge.

Almost anything can turn up on the shelves, from old newspapers and comics to an unidentified egg and a preserved frog.

“The whole place is bonkers,” Wildeboer says.

Out east, Lydia O’Regan sees the same kind of community gathering around one in-demand product: diapers.

O’Regan started the Halifax Diaper Bank in 2025 after realizing there was no easy way for parents to donate unused diapers their children had outgrown. Within five minutes of creating the Facebook page, she was already fielding requests to access donations.

The operation has grown to 16 residential drop-off locations across the Halifax region, with volunteers opening their homes to collect donations. Since 2025, O’Regan handled the day-to-day work of collecting, sorting and distributing diapers, spending at least 40 unpaid hours a week running the diaper bank on top of her full-time job.

“I was blown away at the generosity of the people in our city,” she says.

Some families using the diaper bank have full-time jobs, homes and vehicles, but a sudden expense can leave them short on diapers before payday.

“I think we all don’t realize how close we are to being in a situation like that where you have to reach out for help,” O’Regan says.

Some community members who once received diapers later came back as donors, reaching out when they were in a position to give back and asking what sizes were most needed.

O’Regan says that willingness to help continued even as families faced rising costs of their own.

“The community was incredible and we are so good at taking care of each other,” she says.

The diaper bank is currently on hiatus as O’Regan steps back to focus on her growing family, with another organizer expected to take over in 2027.

Catherine Leviten-Reid, a professor of community economic development at Cape Breton University, studies low-income renters in Nova Scotia. She says many have limited networks they can turn to for help.

Housing instability can make it harder to form relationships with neighbours, she says, while friends and family may also be facing financial pressures of their own. Some of the renters she studies report loneliness and limited connections with the people around them.

Though she’s found no evidence that the affordability crisis itself builds community, Leviten-Reid acknowledges that sharing and reuse initiatives can bring people together. “That can foster social ties,” she says. For some low-income renters, turning to a non-profit can be easier than asking friends or neighbours for help, she says, since informal support can come with an expectation that the favour will eventually be returned.

Helping community members without stigma or strings attached is the mandate of centres like the HodgePodge Lodge, and captures what makes them increasingly important to local communities.

Wildeboer says the Lodge has become a place people turn to for more than free goods.

“If you’re having a bad day, or you’re just thinking the world is never going to get any better,” she says, “come and work at the Lodge, even for an hour, just be in the building.”