Draft:OTCAN
South Korean clothing donation nonprofit
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
OTCAN (Korean: 옷캔) is a South Korean nonprofit organization based in Daejeon that collects donated used clothing for distribution in South Korea and abroad. It was founded in 2009 by Cho Yun-chan. The name combines the Korean word for clothes (옷, ot) and the English word "can".[1]
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Submission declined on 24 March 2026 by Pythoncoder (talk).
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History
OTCAN was founded in 2009 by Cho Yun-chan, a Daejeon-based web designer who had volunteered in Ghana around 2006.[2] While there, he saw Korean secondhand clothing being sold at prices local families could not afford. That experience prompted him to look into how donated clothing was handled back in South Korea.[2] After learning that most of the country's street-side clothing donation bins were operated by for-profit recyclers, he started an online awareness campaign and then established OTCAN to collect and redistribute donated clothing as a nonprofit.[3] The organization was originally intended as a one-off campaign but grew into a registered nonprofit.[1]
A 2011 Yonhap feature reported that OTCAN was at that point collecting about a ton of used clothing per week from households around South Korea. The items were sold through overseas markets, and the annual proceeds — around 40 million won — went to aid projects for children in Africa and Asia.[2]
Activities
OTCAN collects clothing through a mail-in system in which donors arrange a courier pickup.[1] The Hankyung profile reported annual donations of more than 300 tons. Usable items are sorted and sent to recipients in South Korea and overseas.[1] By 2021, the organization had carried out approximately 250 deliveries to recipients in eleven countries.[4]
The 2016 Korea JoongAng Daily feature reported that the clothing was not given away but sold through secondhand traders in the recipient countries, and the proceeds went to children's programs.[3]
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