Spreading the wealth: Ranya Kelly finds home for surplus goods.

• Author: Kelly, Ranya
• Position: Attitude at Altitude - The Redistribution Center

THE ONLY THING RANYA KELLY WAS LOOKING FOR when she climbed into a dumpster 17 years ago was an empty carboard box. What she found instead changed her life.

"Shoes," the Wheat Ridge housewife says, shaking her head in disbelief as she remembers. "Actually it was 500 pairs of shoes."

Those brand-new shoes made Kelly realize that many companies throw away perfectly good items, simply to make room for newer products. She donated those shoes to a homeless shelter--the first of more than half a million pairs she has since given away to people in need around the world, along with clothes, food, building supplies, linens, school notebooks, furniture and countless other surplus items.

On a shoestring budget of $30,000, Kelly runs The Redistribution Center, though which she finds and recycles between $1 million and $4 million worth of surplus consumer products every year.

She has received national acclaim on speaking tours; national magazines such as Family Circle. Good Housekeeping and Ladies Home Journal have chronicled her efforts the White House has sent her a personal letter of commendation and national charitable foundations have been so impressed by her work that they've provided funds for her operating budget and for the warehouse that sits at the back of her lot in Wheat Ridge.

Here in Colorado Kelly receives less recognized but seriously dedicated help from people like Ralph Powell, who runs the King Soopers Reclamation Center and who passes slightly damaged grocery items from King Soopers and City Market stores to dozens of nonprofits including Kelly's Redistribution Center.

Powell says his center doesn't advertise its work and though there's good business sense in the quiet goodwill...