A small army of volunteers from all walks of life were working hard on the sales floor of the recently relocated Safe Shift Estate Sale/Resale store, Saturday afternoon.
Determined to have everything in tip-top shape before the shop’s launch this Thursday, the team spent hours pulling inventory from boxes, unwrapping antiques, wiping down shelves and placing glassware.
In a back room that once served as an office for one the building’s earliest tenants, Purple Cow Furniture, Barbara Murphy, a semi-retired archaeologist, spent her volunteer time surveying the hundreds of books that will soon be for sale, sorted into categories on shelves that lined the walls.
“The biggest challenge is that we have so many coffee table books,” Murphy said. “They don’t fit on a regular shelf. If I adjust the shelves, I don’t have room for the other books. It is a balancing act.”
Like many on Safe Shift’s all-volunteer staff, Murphy is happy to put in the work because she ultimately knows who it benefits.
Safe Shift serves as the primary source of sustainable funding for the Greater Tucson Fire Foundation, a nonprofit that facilitates health and wellness resources for Tucson area firefighters, first responders and their families.
In 2019, the shop, at its old location on East 29th Street, netted $70,000, with 96 cents of every dollar going toward Fire Foundation programming.
“It all goes to benefit the firefighters,” said Mike McKendrick, chairman of the Fire Foundation and a retired assistant chief with Tucson Fire.
McKendrick helped get Safe Shift off the ground and leads its inventory acquisition team.
“Most things that benefit firefighters, benefit the community,” he added. “The cliché is ‘take care of those who take care of us.’”
The Fire Foundation launched 11 years ago, but has only been raising money through its resale program for the last four years.
Early on, organizers, including McKendrick and fellow retired TFD assistant chief Dave Ridings, were looking for different ways to raise funds beyond the typical golf tournament or gala event.
They started by keeping inventory, acquired through donations, estate sale residuals, and real estate clear-outs, in storage units and staging their own sales in area homes.
Eventually, they graduated to operating out of 6,000 square feet of space in a strip mall on East 29th Street.
When they lost their lease on East 29th late last year, they relocated to their new home at 2801 E. Grant Road, just west of North Country Club Road, next door to Tucson Fire’s Station No. 5.
The property, which has more than 8,000 square feet of retail space, but hasn’t been actively used as a storefront for many years, had seen better days.
“It was somewhat blighted,” McKendrick said. “We had to use chainsaws and weed-whackers, shovels, rakes, axes on the property surrounding it.”
As of Saturday, the new space was in much better shape, thanks to the efforts of the shop’s regular volunteers, many of whom are current and retired fire service members.
At 30 years old, Zachary Volner is one of Safe Shift’s newest volunteers and also one of its youngest.
Volner, a server at Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse, found out about Safe Shift through his mom, who went to high school in Tucson with McKendrick.
“Mike said he needed help moving heavy stuff occasionally,” Volner said. “I’m usually free during the day, so I thought, ‘Why not?’ ”
A couple times a week, Volner will find himself working with a crew to clear out a home or pick up estate sale leftovers to bring back to the shop.
“It is a lot of lifting furniture, loading and unloading trailers and bins,” Volner said. “But it is for a very good cause. It feels good to be a part of that.”
