Dressed in Dignity: The Give-n-Receive Inc

When access to clothing becomes a privilege, getting dressed in the morning carries a weight most people never have to feel. The Give-n-Receive Inc. was built to lift that weight, and a seed grant from The Pollination Project helped make it possible.

Marisa Ikpoh knows what it feels like to quietly go without. Growing up in a single-parent household in Chicago, she didn’t always have the language for the financial struggles her family faced — but she felt them, especially in the small moments when basic clothing felt like a luxury rather than a given. Decades later, as a wife, mother of four daughters, and the President and Founder of The Give-n-Receive Inc., she has turned that lived experience into a grassroots movement redefining what charitable giving can look and feel like.

“Mental health, good energy, hygiene, and inclusion are not luxuries — they are necessities,” says Ikpoh. “When financial struggles come, clothing is often the first sacrifice people make. But one look at an individual given access to quality items in an awesome environment, and you can see just how deep the need truly runs.”

The Give-n-Receive operates as a free community pop-up thrift boutique, offering gently used clothing and accessories for all genders, ages, and sizes — no donation required to shop. Community members can bring clean clothing and accessory donations to any pop-up event or clothing drive, where items are sorted for quality and added to racks on-site or retained for future boutiques. Items that don’t meet quality standards are redirected to other organizations, keeping them out of landfills. The result is a thoughtfully curated, dignified shopping experience — one that happens to cost nothing.

When The Pollination Project awarded The Give-n-Receive a seed grant through its Daily Grant Program, the impact was immediate and tangible. Before the grant, limited equipment and mobility restricted pop-up events to within a three-mile radius of Chicago’s Belmont Cragin neighborhood. The $996.43 investment went entirely into the infrastructure needed to make each event run more smoothly, more efficiently, and with greater capacity to serve the community: two portable clothing racks, three mobile sorting carts, a folding table, a portable dolly, organizational shelving, pants hangers, an organizing cabinet, and more.

“This has eased the process of packing and unpacking, which allows for more hands-on time with the community,” Ikpoh says.

That hands-on time matters. At each event, a minimum of 200 items of clothing and accessories are taken — a figure measured not by a cash register, but by the rhythm of racks being restocked as fast as they’re emptied. To date, the project has directly impacted more than 500 people, a number that grows with every pop-up.

The Pollination Project’s model of trust-based, unrestricted seed funding is precisely what allowed Ikpoh to act on her vision without bureaucratic barriers — a vivid example of how high-leverage philanthropy works when it reaches community-rooted leaders with lived experience of the issues they’re solving. Recognition followed swiftly: a WGN News Spotlight Chicago feature, three radio interviews across Throwback 100.3, The Drive 97.1, and 101.9 The Mix, and a $21,000 grant from the Estate of Terry and Donna King. Momentum that might never have built without that early operational foundation.

Ikpoh’s next goal is full mobility, a completely mobile pop-up boutique capable of driving the entire operation, intact, to neighborhoods across Chicago and beyond.

“We will continue popping up with the free boutique in order to help bridge the gap in clothing insecurity,” she says, “while creating a space that not only offers a dignified charitable shopping experience, but helps to restore faith in humanity.”

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