Bengaluru: Clothes bank for poor provides garments costing Rs 1 each

Bengaluru: A charitable trust, called Imagine Trust, has opened a clothes bank for the underprivileged in Electronic City which provides garments costing Rs 1 per piece.

The trust was started in 2013 by Melisha Noronha, her husband Vinod Lobo, her mother Gladys, and two of her friends, Nitin Kumar and Vignesh.

They came up with the idea of the cloth bank during the peak of the pandemic this year.

Vinod Lobo said that in 2002 at Mangaluru’s St Aloysius, they had started a clothes bank for the city’s streets poor by collecting clothes through contributions by school students in the city.

The clothes bank, which started in September, is open on Sundays. It includes shirts, pants, skirts, saris and jackets and are displayed like any other clothing at a showroom.

A poor family spends about Rs 2,000 annually on clothes and the idea was to help them save the money, a trust member said.