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Kansas Lego fan turns Millennium Falcon into charity for kids

By Shea Corrigan

The Lego logo is displayed outside the entrance to Legoland Japan theme park in Nagoya, Japan, on Friday, March 17, 2017. The 8th Legoland theme park in the world will open on April 1. Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The Lego logo is displayed outside the entrance to Legoland Japan theme park in Nagoya, Japan, on Friday, March 17, 2017. The 8th Legoland theme park in the world will open on April 1. Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg via Getty Images /
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A Kansas man turned a personal goal to build the Millennium Falcon into a charity providing sets to disadvantaged kids.

Four years ago, Matthew Gould – lifelong Lego aficionado and father of three – had an 8-foot-long, 3-foot-wide, 18-inch-deep Lego “trough” in his basement and a goal. Today, by way of one Millennium Falcon, he has a charity that gives away complete, reconstructed Lego sets to abused and neglected children in Jackson County, Kansas.

After Gould decided he wanted to build the 5,175-piece Lego Millennium Falcon, he also decided that he wasn’t willing to pay the $3,200 eBay asking price for the set. But, he had quite the collection of Lego in his basement and with instructions he found online, he was able to build almost the entire thing with pieces he already owned.

Then, Gould applied that same strategy to a charity now known as The Giving Brick. When charities accept used Lego, if they accept them at all, they usually just fill up a bag and send them overseas. As he told the Kansas City Star, Gould “wanted them to be able to not just play with Lego bricks but to actually build a toy that they could play with and imagine with.”

To this end, the basement trough at the Gould household has been replaced with 380 plastic bins containing hundreds of thousands of bricks and parts. The pieces come from drop-off containers at stores and organizations that can’t use them as well as boxes that donors ship to the Gould’s home. The family has a storage unit for what they can’t accommodate. As the Star described,

"Once they arrive, the boxes or bags of bricks — some full sets; some “maybe” sets, as Gould calls them; others total hodge-podges — are stacked on one set of basement shelves. Gould disassembles them if necessary, then cleans each brick using a three-sink method — one with bleach, dish-washing liquid and water; the other two with water. Then they’re set to dry on a multishelf restaurant kitchen rack.Next comes the inventorying, with each brick placed in its proper, hopefully temporary home. There are 10 bins exclusively for different types of Lego plates, three for hinges, four for panels. Magnets, motors, fences, flags, cylinders, ladders, hooks all get their own bins, as do animals, aircraft, arms, bars, baseplates, raised baseplates. Two shelves hold nothing but cars, trucks, boats and spaceships."

The family and volunteers then assemble sets.  Individual pieces fill out “maybe” and “needy” sets. Once complete, the sets go to church groups, Scout troops and other volunteer organizations who assemble them to check all the pieces are correct and accounted for. Once they pass the construction test, the groups return the sets to Gould who packages them up and delivers them to Court Appointed Special Advocates, an organization that works with abused and neglected children.

It’s a small operation for now. The Star story recounts the participation of one geologist and Lego lover, but Gould hopes one day to have a permanent space where he can run an assembly line that yields 200 or more sets a year. Whether he puts together 200 or 20, the kids of Kansas City now get the chance to build dream sets from Harry Potter, the Hobbit, Star Wars and more.

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