A store in Tauranga is literally turning rags into riches, raising money for people in our community to access free counselling by selling rags. Yes, you read it right.

For the past month Kaysams Retail Surplus Store Tauranga, owned by wife-and-husband Kaysi and Sam Fredericks, has been in the process of changing from a variety store to an opshop.

The Kaysam team has been collecting donations of sheets, t-shirts, towels – cutting and bagging them to sell to raise money for people to get free counselling.

Hot property

And it turns out rags are hot property. 'We can't keep enough on the shelves!”

'We've got cleaners, we've got plumbers, we've got mechanics, we've got all kinds of people actually, coming in [to buy them], we keep getting them in, which is brilliant, and my kids have fun cutting them all up – that might be therapy in itself.”

And so Kaysi and Sam are calling on the community to donate more old towels, shirts – or anything that can be turned into rags – to keep the fundraiser going.

'Instead of filling the landfill up with rags, we're actually telling people: ‘Hey look if you've got these things that most opshops say: ‘No thanks to' – we'll take them, we can do it and we can half the price'.”

The store charges $6.99 per one kilogram bag and means Kaysi and Sam 'can help people get into the therapy that they need”.

Call to counselling

Kaysi says helping people get into counselling is a huge passion for her and her husband. 'We've had a really good response from the public because there needs to be more help for people.”

Kaysi got into gear with this initiative after someone desperately needing help couldn't afford counselling.

One day working at the store, she received a phone call from them. 'I answered [the phone] and he goes: ‘I've got a gun to my head,' so I wrote a note to my husband and was like ‘I've really got to take this call right now' and I spent three hours on the phone with him…he's absolutely on the right track now and we're doing therapy and everything.”

Using the funds raised from rags and proceeds from other donations, Kaysi says: 'We've already put six people through – so six people have already received six sessions of counselling.

'We've got counsellors and we've also got psychologists and they donate their time to work with the people.” With funds raised, Kaysams is working towards opening office spaces for people to go for free counselling and is planning to set up a counselling hotline too. 'People don't have the community connections anymore – people don't know how to talk to another person anymore,” says Kaysi.

'[So] If we can get all those connections together, we may actually be able to change the world.”

She asks anyone with donations to bring them in. Kaysams is open 9am-4.30pm Monday to Friday, 9am-2pm Saturdays, and 9.30am-2pm Sundays, at 84 First Ave, Tauranga City.