Warm Up 3

Berlin has the kind of people who just decide to do something and then do it. Mary Scherpe’s taste had already become the city’s reference point, and for her third Warm Up, she made a straightforward call: bring your best clothes to Voo Store. Not the garbage you want gone. The stuff you actually like. Warm coats. Good sneakers. Things you’d wear yourself.

They came with real donations. Stuff got sorted, catalogued, auctioned off with prizes from Mykita and other brands that threw in rewards. The whole thing happened without ceremony or self-congratulation—just donations moving through Voo Store to the people who needed them, coordinated by Kreuzberg hilft.

Kreuzberg hilft operates that way. They work directly with refugee communities across Berlin, organize projects, manage donations, handle the unglamorous logistics of actually moving resources to where they’re needed. No institutional performance, no foundation language. Just work.

I think a lot about the difference between feeling like you’re helping and actually helping. Maybe it comes down to specificity. You see a call that makes sense, you know the people involved are serious, you do something concrete. It’s different from the usual machinery of charity. It’s people who know each other and their city, moving resources to where they actually matter.