Everything For Sale At This Pop-Up Shop Will Be Sent Directly To Refugees

Supplies similar to those sold at the pop-up Image by Getty Images

By Jenny Singer December 3, 2018

Exchanging money for goods and services can inspire an (albeit brief) dopamine rush. Doing good works feels even better and lasts longer. A UK-based NGO, Help Refugees, decided to combine both. The result? Your head and your heart won’t even know what hit them.

Choose Love is a pop-up store in Manhattan. In the style of the pop-up shop phenomenon, the space is airy, minimal, and, naturally, in Soho. But instead of an independent makeup label or a line of handcrafted shoes, the store sells diapers, emergency blankets, and basic groceries. Shoppers who visit Choose Love select items that will be shipped to refugees in eighty places for displaced people, including France, Croatia, Iraq, and Greece.

At the Soho location, shoppers can select packages and products for refugees in three categories — arrival, shelter, and future. Sponsoring a hot meal costs four dollars. A shelter bundle, which includes a waterproof tent, a sleeping bag, a hygiene pack, and meal ingredients, is eighty dollars. And if you don’t happen to be trundling around SoHo between today and Christmas Eve, the last day of the originally London-based pop-up, you can achieve a similar rush by shopping on the Choose Love website.

Last year, the New York Times reports, the Choose Love pop-up in London allowed shoppers to gift 800,000 meals, 125,000 essential items, and 77,000 packages of diapers to refugees in need.

So long, solitary searches through confusing charity websites for donation pages! Here’s a way to do some Hanukkah shopping, share resources with those forced to flee violence and persecution, and enjoy the bustle of upscale holiday shopping with none of the commercialism. Your post-shopping hot chocolate will never feel more deserved.

Jenny Singer is the deputy lifestyle editor for the Forward. You can reach her at Singer@forward.com or on Twitter @jeanvaljenny

Jenny Singer is a freelance writer with pieces in Vox, the Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Teen Vogue, and more. She was previously a staff writer at Glamour and the Forward, and she’s currently getting an MFA in nonfiction writing at the University of Iowa.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

The coming year promises to be filled with more complex and historic developments. We are entering an era where independent, fact-based Jewish journalism will be more important than ever. We need to be ready for whatever 2025 will bring, and with your help, we can be.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO