Imagine that you’ve worked hard, maybe for years, to escape homelessness. You’ve sought help and saved every penny you could to finally get the keys to an apartment, a safe place where you and your family can settle. But there’s no furniture. No table to eat at, no sofa to sit on, or even a bed to rest on at night. For many coming out of homelessness, it’s the devastating reality—but it’s also a situation that the home industry is uniquely positioned to help solve. By partnering with furniture banks, organizations that provide home furnishings to those in need at little to no cost, designers and industry brands alike have the opportunity to truly make a difference.

Furniture banks exist across the country and typically share a similar model of using donated furniture to fill homes for those who need it most—people transitioning out of homelessness, people who have lost everything in natural disasters, those fleeing domestic violence or refugees settling in a new country, depending on the organization. Unlike a charity secondhand shop like, say, Habitat for Humanity ReStore, furniture banks are not open to the public and do not sell items. Instead, they usually work in tandem with social workers and local nonprofits or religious organizations, which do the work of vetting candidates, referring them to the furniture bank and covering the nominal fees (typically less than $100 per client). After a client has been referred, they can make an appointment to go into a warehouse or showroom, where they select everything from beds and case goods to linens and tableware. “Having the ability to choose what you want in your home is a really important part of this process,” says Phil Gerigscott, the communications manager of the Community Warehouse, a furniture bank in Portland, Oregon. “A lot of people in these situations haven’t had the ability to make choices for themselves for some time. Giving them a sense of autonomy in picking what they want, that’s important.”

We talk a lot in the interior design industry about the forms and functions of furniture, but thinking of furniture as a matter of dignity can offer a different perspective. Gerigscott remembers working with one family for whom donated furniture enabled a simple ritual many might take for granted. “They had a teenage son [whose] girlfriend kept asking to meet his family, but he wouldn’t invite her to his house because he didn’t want her to see that they didn’t have basic furniture, like a dining table,” says Gerigscott. “After they got their furniture delivered, they had a big family dinner and he invited her over. They had a table and place settings. To a lot of us, those are small things, but [for others] it makes a world of difference in their sense of self.”

A major issue that furniture banks work to solve is the lack of beds for people in poverty—an essential task, given that an estimated an estimated 2 to 3 percent of American children are without a bed of their own. Diane Charles, the executive director of the Furniture Bank of Metro Detroit, the nation’s oldest furniture bank, says one of its primary initiatives focuses on donating beds for kids, with a goal of placing 1,000 twin beds in homes this year. On delivery day, seeing the happiness of children who have never had their own bed—some having shared a bed with other family members, others are used to sleeping on sofas or on the floor—makes for some deeply moving moments, says Charles. Similarly, Gerigscott recently had a client who had been living in their car for three years. Getting set up in a two-bedroom apartment, complete with twin beds for their children, made it possible for their kids to visit and spend the night at their home for the first time in years. Furniture banks also generally accept used mattresses, something that many charities, including ReStore shops, do not.

Derrick Sides, the executive director of the Barnabas Furniture Bank in Greensboro, North Carolina, says that there’s beauty in giving furniture a new meaning as well. He recalls a rocking chair that had been sitting on their warehouse floor for such a long time that the staff thought no one would ever want it. Then one day a man came in and fell in love with the rocker. “He was happy to get everything else, but he was over the moon about this rocking chair and put it on the front porch of his house,” says Sides. “Sometimes you’ll see this almost spiritual connection that people form to pieces that might otherwise have gone to a landfill. It’s beautiful. We’re sentimental about people, but we’re also sentimental about furniture. We believe in second chances for both.”

The most direct way that interior designers and furniture companies can support a local furniture bank is through donations. Designers might suggest making a donation to a client that’s offloading old furnishings, while furniture companies could donate returned or flawed pieces. Some companies can donate pieces they’d otherwise sell for pennies on the dollar and potentially deduct the full retail value on their taxes. “It depends on the individual company and their tax situation, but that’s a win for them financially, and it’s also an altruistic donation,” says Sides.

Organizations like Barnabas and the Community Warehouse do have shoppable programs that are open to the public, where they sell pieces that might not be a fit for their typical client. For example, Sides says donated sectionals are usually too big for their clients’ modest-size homes. If the furniture bank gets a high-end piece, the proceeds of selling that item can sometimes pay for two or three more affordably priced items or other operational expenses. (The organization sells pieces like that at a semiannual auction. “Most of our donations are going directly to families, but if there are pieces that are unique or high-value, we will auction those off, fuel our truck and pay our staff to collect 30 couches the next month,” explains Sides.) In a similar vein, the Community Warehouse operates a thrift store where it sells less practical donations, like Murano glass goblets or Lalique glass figurines.

There are also opportunities for designers to help fundraise and draw attention to their local furniture bank. Portland-based designer Jessica Helgerson used her initiative The One Percent Project, through which she gives clients the option to donate one percent of their billing statement to organizations that serve the homeless community, to make a $150,000 grant to the Community Warehouse, a sum that enabled them to buy and staff a truck that picks up donations and delivers furniture to clients. “Our office is based in downtown Portland, where we see a lot of very dire poverty, and at the same time, we work with very wealthy people,” says the designer. “I am at the epicenter of discrepancy. I think a furniture bank is an ideal place for interior designers to help. You’re giving people who wouldn’t otherwise have the ability to come in and ‘shop,’ to choose what they want to put in their home and have it delivered, all for free. They get to make their home theirs, which is amazing. We work in a very exclusive, luxury profession, and I think that anything we can do to help make our society more equitable is well worth participating in.”

To that end, Sides notes that people coming out of poverty who get help with furnishing their homes are much farther on their journey than they would be otherwise. Furniture, even when it’s purchased secondhand, is expensive. “By taking this cost off their plate, we’ve helped them on a path to self-sufficiency,” he says. “Our hope is that they become furniture customers in the future. If we do our job right, they’ll be in a position to upgrade eventually. We’ve had people call us and say, ‘You guys helped me two or three years ago. I’m in a better place now. I’d love to donate these things back to you because I’m moving to a new place and I’ve got new furniture coming in.’ That’s when you see that circle completed.”