We rely on donations of good quality pre-loved items to help support families across Surrey and Croydon. Every donation we receive is carefully sorted and shared with those who need it most, so please help us by only donating items that are clean, safe and in a condition you would be happy to pass on to someone else.
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It is important that every item we rehome is safe, high quality, fit for purpose and suitable for the families we support. We use a range of safety and quality checks, informed by guidance from organisations including the NHS, the Lullaby Trust, consumer safety bodies, British Safety Standards, and our referral partners.
Before donating, please ensure items such as cots, cotbeds, cribs, highchairs and buggies meet our current safety guidelines. If an item does not meet these requirements, we may be unable to accept it.
Donating to Stripey Stork is easy and will make a big difference to the families we are supporting. By following these simple steps, you can help us get the items to the families who need them quickly
We can’t rehome any used mattresses due to safety concerns. It’s widely recommended that the safest option is to have a new mattress for each baby. We use grants and funding to ensure that every Moses basket, cot, cot bed, toddler bed or pram we give out comes with a new mattress to ensure a comfortable and safe night’s sleep.
See Surrey County Council’s website for a list of community recycling centres in Surrey.
We are unable to guarantee the safety and condition of a used car seat, and our insurers prohibit us from rehoming them. This is because we can’t prove with absolute certainty that a car seat hasn’t been involved in an accident and is therefore completely safe to use.
Safety regulations are frequently updated meaning older models may not be safe. In addition, harnesses and buckles can deteriorate over time.
For further information, please see this useful website about child car seats.
See Surrey County Council’s website for a list of community recycling centres in Surrey.
We don’t have space in our warehouse to store large items like this. At the same time, many of the families we support don’t have the space for larger items of furniture or those deemed as ‘nice to haves’ such as changing tables.
We work closely with Furnistore in Merstham, a great charity that not only welcomes donations of larger furniture items but also offers a collection service. As well as redistributing items, they support the community by selling them on at discounted prices for those on means-tested benefits. See our blog for other suggestions of where to donate furniture locally.
We appreciate that children love bikes but as well as space being a premium for us and some families, we aren’t qualified to service them and ensure safety mechanisms like brakes are working correctly. There are however a couple of local charities we recommend that do just that with unwanted bikes, as well as finding new homes for them or using any money made for good: Bikes Revived in Crawley, and Horley friends of St Catherine’s Hospice recycled bikes.
All electronic equipment, such as baby monitors and sterilisers, needs to be safety (PAT) tested by someone with the right knowledge and experience. We don’t have this facility and the capability in-house. In addition, items like baby monitors start to deteriorate in performance after prolonged use and we don’t want to take a risk on items which families rely on.
An alternative is DEBRA in Crawley that offers a collection service. The British Heart Foundation also offer a collection service for electrical items, which can be booked via their website.
For hygiene reasons, we can only pass on new breast pumps which are sealed and therefore we know are sterile. We don’t have the equipment to sterilise them at the warehouse or the knowledge to be able to guarantee this has been properly done. Newborn babies can be susceptible to bacteria, so to ensure they have the best start in life we only accept new breast pumps.
There is something special about knitted clothes for babies and we appreciate the care that goes into knitting keepsakes for babies. To ensure they are safe to be worn, we cannot accept any knitted clothes with buttons, ribbons, string or embellishments. Little mouths like to seek these out and are therefore a serious choking hazard. It is also essential that you attach labels detailing the type of wool used in case of any allergies.
All toys that we pass on are safety checked first by our team of volunteers. One of these important checks is to ensure they carry the CE mark. This is the most basic legal requirement that all toys must conform to in the UK, including those which have been donated to charity or those which have been handmade. Without this, we are unable to accept or give such items out.
Our main focus has always been items for babies and children. We simply don’t have the storage space to stock items outside of this scope.
There are some great charities which accept maternity clothes, such as Their Voice, a local organisation we work with that support survivors of modern slavery or Smalls For All, a national charity that collect nursing bras. Alternatively, you could always donate to a local charity shop or clothes bank.
