At Pop Lazar’s, a charity shop AND a hub of good deeds

Charity work in today's Bucharest

Eugen Nasta, 28.01.2025, 14:00

We’re still early into 2025 and we’re bound to discover initiatives carried for the good of the communities, so we sat down and had a talk about a project highlighting the fact that each donation, each act of charity has contributed to putting a smile back on the faces of the downtrodden and to turning this world into a warmer place, into a place which is full of hope to a greater extent. Such a place has a name: At Pop Lazar’s Charity Shop.

Inspired by the very popular profile of Bucharest in the late 19th and the early 20th century, Pop Lazar, a Jew who was into flea stuff trading, also drawing inspiration from the British concept of Charity Shop, a concept providing elegance to those frequenting its premises, the president of the Medical Association for Public Health, Elena Raluca Smuc Tănase, has initiated this project.

At Pop Lazar’s is a charity shop and a project of the Medical Association for Public Health. The president of the Medical Association for Public Health and co-founder of the shop, Elena Raluca Smuc Tănase, told us all what it was all about.

“It’s about Charity Shop a concept people abroad are all too familiar with. For instance, in England, the Red Cross has such a shop which is more than 100 years old and there also are big charity organizations initiating such projects in a bid to supplement their funds. As you know, streams of funding are provided by donations, fundraisers, abroad, or via shops of this kind.

We thought of setting up such a shop in 2017, when we realized we received donations, objects we could not use at that time but which were in a very good condition and which, for us, could turn into a form of aid. People could donate brand new products, for us, or things in good condition, for instance clothes, household objects, books, China, jewels.

They need to be in mint condition since we have not just as yet implemented a recycling system, for example, a tailor’s shop where we should repair things or recondition certain clothes and give then a new life. That is why, as we speak, we can only receive things in very good condition, clean, of course and without stains. “

Although people want the project to be expanded, perhaps in a bid to set up a partnership with a drycleaners or a tailor’s, our guest today confessed that for the time being they did not have the capacity to set up yet another shop of the same kind, for instance.

“It is a project requiring the continuous presence of the one who thought it out or who dreamed of it. It is a shop yet it is also a community hub, so there is a whole story behind this shop: it helps us raise the funding by means of which we can exist and carry our projects but it is a meeting place as well, a place where people have the opportunity to be generous, where people can…I don’t know…have a little conversation, it is a true community. And then, in a bid to maintain the spirit, for the time being we haven’t thought of setting up yet another shop with such a theme. “

During holidays, At Pop Lazar’s reaches communities countrywide with aid, via the Children, Boots and Socks project. The president of the Medical Association for Public Health, Elena Raluca Smuc Tănase, gave us details on that:

“It is a project I love and which has become one of our brands. It is a project we implemented in 2019 after a visit we paid to a community and which is strictly carried with the help of the charity shop’s friends. Meaning that people turn up as early as October and express their wish to support us in this project and they simply donate a pair of boots, a couple of pairs of socks as well as other beautiful things they put in a box they wrap nicely. For instance, we have succeeded to have more than 800 children countrywide.

They are children from various regions, they are children coming from families or they are children from care centers or from village schools, we do not have a certain category in mind. We reach there where we have collaborators of where they call for help or there where we think we can get involved. It is a project I hold most dear!

There are those months, those days when we meet again with friends of the shop, when we have a chat. For instance, you receive a child you help and that gift box becomes the reason why you meet his family or do some shopping together with the family or create a little cell at your workplace where several colleagues make a box or 10 boxes or 20 boxes. It is an extraordinary moment of human generosity and solidarity, generating a lot of confidence in us, whereby all that we do, we do it nicely and properly. “

Another project provides donations of coloring pencils and coloring books, to be given away in hospitals. At Pop Lazar’s has grown into a space where people can find inspiration yet they can also feel they are part of a greater cause, a cause where the good has its well-established place.