For Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Manhattan Mini Storage teamed up with Avon Walk NYC to help raise money for breast cancer research, screenings, support, and treatment to those who need it.

We pledged to donate $1 for every new Facebook “Like” our page got between October 1^st and October 23^rd during Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and with your help we were able to raise almost $1,000! We’ll be sending our donation to the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer this week, along with our congratulations for an amazingly successful 2011 Avon Walk season.

If you haven’t visited us on Facebook yet, be sure to “Like” our page for more ways to help out some of our favorite New York City causes. You can also follow us on Twitter!

Find out how we’ve supported other great local organizations in NYC, like the Coalition for the Homeless, Mighty Mutts, and The Crazy Piano Guy.

Photo from Avon Walk for Breast Cancer on Facebook (click to visit)

Because October is Breast Cancer Awareness month, we’re excited to be able to help support Avon for the annual New York City Avon Walk for Breast Cancer! We’ll be donating $1 to the NYC Avon Walk for every new Facebook fan we count over the next 2 weeks.

Regardless of ability to pay, our mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters all deserve a chance to fight this terrible disease. That’s why nation-wide Avon Walks work to raise money to provide breast cancer research, screenings, support, and treatment to those who need it through local, regional and national breast cancer organizations.*

Avon Walk NYC: A Like is All It Takes to Donate

Starting October 1^st until October 16^th (the last day of the NYC Avon Walk), Manhattan Mini Storage will be making donations for every incoming Facebook “Like” for our page: facebook.com/manhattanministorage. Show your support for Breast Cancer Awareness month, and help Avon make health possible for New York City women and women nationwide!

On Monday, October 17^th we’ll announce our total donation amount, so make sure to share with your friends and family – it can make all the difference!

Want to do more than donate? Join the NYC Avon Walk for Breast Cancer, taking place the weekend of October 15-16. To learn more and to register for the NYC-wide walk, visit the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer site.

*In 2010, the NYC Avon Walk contributed to local NYC organizations such as the Young Survival Coalition, The Fund for Public Health New York, the Avon Safety Net Program at Bellevue Hospital, the Rosewell Park Alliance Foundation, and the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. To learn more, visit AvonWalk.org.

Two Students Score $500 in Our Back-to-School Textbook Giveaway

In August we kicked off our back-to-school College Textbook Giveaway – We Major in Storage. We set up shop on campuses all over the city to welcome back students from the New School, FIT, VVNY, Hunter College, Columbia, Barnard, Fordham, NYU, Pace University, and the School of Visual Arts. This week, we’re happy to announce the two lucky winners of our $500 prize!

Congratulations to:

Tori Sartain – NYU
You just won $500! How will you spend it?
“I am going to spend it on the rest of my textbooks and things for my dorm!”

Brandon Reeves – CUNY City College
How will you use your $500 prize?
“I plan on using half to pay for the books I haven’t bought yet, and the other half on a new computer that I’ve been saving up for.”

We know the prices of college textbooks just keep going up, so we’re glad to help Tori and Brandon stretch their dollars a little further!

Being a student is tough, but we can help! Find us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for more specials, freebies, and fun prizes. Plus, we’ve got the best NYC student storage rates in town! Give us a call anytime at 212-STORAGE for rates as low as $29/month.

It’s Time for Back to School Shopping!

Remember that feeling you had the day before school started each fall? Part GROAN, part excitement? You couldn’t wait to put your new character backpacks, shiny gel-pens, and colorful notebooks to use.

Photo by Claudia Snell, Flickr

Not every child gets to start of the school year that way. For kids without homes in New York City, back to school shopping is unthinkable and their grades can suffer because of it.

Help us bring some stability to these students as we partner once again with the Coalition for the Homeless for Project: Back to School, and initiative that helps provide New York City’s homeless children with backpacks and other classroom essentials. With your help, we can make sure they’re better prepared for the start of the school year.

How to pitch in:

Just buy a few extra pencils, crayons, glue sticks, rulers, binders, or calculators while doing your own family’s back-to-school shopping this year. Or, donate last year’s leftover school supplies if your family won’t need them.

Then, drop off your extra school supplies at any of our Manhattan Mini Storage locations – we’ve set up donation boxes at all 17 of our locations.

Help us give every single New York City child the chance to excel in the classroom this year!

Visit the Project: Back to School page for a downloadable Wish List, and for more info about this wonderful program.

If you’re a small business owner, you might not have the presentation space to help you blow away clients or investors with your winning ideas. That’s where our sister company Workspace Offices can save the day: professional, contemporary conference rooms in NYC for rent, at affordable prices.

When you use Workspace Offices’ conference rooms, you’ll have ample room for up to 20 people, teleconference and presentation supplies, and Wi-Fi services. They’ll even throw in coffee service for you and your colleagues, so you don’t have to schlep to Starbucks yourself.

Workspace Offices has convenient locations in Inwood and the Lower East Side (on Spring Street), so you’ll never be late to your own meetings. Rates start at just $45 per hour.

Workspace Offices is on Facebook, too!

Like their Inwood location or their Spring St location pages, and all fans of Workspace Offices will get their first hour absolutely FREE when they rent a conference room for 3 or more hours. How’s that to perk up an otherwise routine day of meetings?

To inquire, contact a Workspace Offices representative at 212-631-5990 or  info@workspaceoffices.com. You can also schedule a free tour to see the Workspace Offices by filling out a contact form on workspaceoffices.com!

This past weekend Manhattan Mini Storage was overjoyed to be a part of history, as New York City’s gay couples embarked on the state’s first marriage ceremonies!

Our team was there to supply the crowds and newlyweds alike with fabulous accessories to celebrate the occasion: top hats, feathered boas, necklaces, tiaras and bouquets. We had a great time taking pictures with all the happy new couples on Sunday, and wishing them wedded bliss.

Our team even created an oversized picture frame to commemorate all the photos we took on the first day gay marriage became legal in New York; the “Just Married” frame was a huge hit with couples! See some of the video we took:

We counted around 400 couples lining the street that day at Manhattan’s Office of the City Clerk waiting to say “I do.” The air was filled with love, plus bubbles and confetti to celebrate the big day!

Our Manhattan Mini Storage team camped out at the exit along with families and friends to wait for new couples exiting the revolving doors. As each couple appeared, the entire crowd filled the air with horn blowing, screaming, and even more confetti!

It was a great day in history for NYC, and we here at Manhattan Mini Storage were happy to be a part of it – showing the love we have for all New Yorkers. Congrats to all the happy newlyweds, and WAY TO GO NYC!

If you missed out, don’t worry – you can enter to win your own t-shirt from Manhattan Mini Storage celebrating gay rights in NY! Just head over to our Facebook page.

You can also see more pictures of the happy day on our Facebook page – check out our Gay Marriage in NYC album.

Happy couples at Manhattan's Office of the City Clerk on Sunday, July 24th

We like things that make us chuckle here at Manhattan Mini Storage, and as our VP of Marketing Stacy Stuart says, “New Yorkers deserve a good laugh!” That’s why we teamed up with the nonprofit organization NYLaughs this month to help sponsor their mission: to take comedy to the people.

Now, NYLaughs needs our help one more time! They’re in the running for a Pepsi Grant, a $25,000 gift that will go a long way towards helping them transplant live comedy from indoor clubs to the open, public spaces of NYC. All they need is votes!

Do you appreciate a good belly laugh on a sunny afternoon? Vote for NYLaughs in Pepsi’s Refresh Project! Here’s how:

• Text in a vote:  Text 107329 to PEPSI (73774)
• Vote online: www.refresheverything.com/laughterinthepark
• Save Pepsi Caps/Cartons: Save the “power codes” from specially marked Pepsi packaging or under specially marked Pepsi bottles and use them when you vote! They’ll make your vote count more. (You can also email them to nylaughs@gmail.com)

Want more ways to help? Tweet: “Help nylaughs.org win grant 2 bring free comedy 2 parks. VOTE: www.refresheverything.com/laughterinthepark OR TEXT:107329 to Pepsi-73774”

You can vote online AND text each day, which means you can vote twice! If you support NYLaughs’ mission and/or giggling, guffawing, whooping, smiling, hooting, cackling, grinning, or tee-heeing, hurry and vote before July’s voting period ends: www.refresheverything.com/laughterinthepark

Questions? Email nylaughs@gmail.com or call 917-727-5233.

Manhattan Mini Storage will be at the Office of the City Clerk on July 24^th to show our support when gay marriage becomes legal in NYC. Why? Because, Love Is Equal.

To celebrate this wonderful moment in history, we hit the streets and asked New Yorkers for their take: “What is love?”

On Sunday, July 24^th we’ll be taking wedding photos of all the happy couples getting legally hitched that day and we’ll be offering FREE STORAGE. Find us in the Wedding Garden across from the Office of the City Clerk (141 Worth Street)!

Follow the day’s festivities on our Facebook page, Twitter (#legallove), and Flickr photostream.

For more info, see our official announcement: Come To Our Big Fat Gay Wedding Celebration!

A Facebook fan of ours recently shared a link with us to the trailer for “Esposito,” a new feature-length film showing at the Manhattan Film Festival in July. We loved it, because it’s about a subject near and dear to our hearts: the contents of a storage unit.

We know that the things you keep in storage mean something to you. Otherwise, you’d have thrown them away long ago! And because that’s also what this new film is about, we’re giving away 2 free tickets to the screening on July 25^th.

This beautiful-looking film, which has already won several awards at film festivals, is about a boy’s mission to win the heart of a girl with her own lost belongings.

See the trailer here:

To win 2 free tickets to see Esposito at the Manhattan Film Festival, just tell us one thing by posting it on our Facebook wall: what‘s the best gift to win someone’s heart? We’ll pick a winner in the coming weeks!

If you’re more of a Twitter addict you can tweet us @ManhattanMini instead, and use the hashtag #storeandlove.

If you’re looking for your own secure NYC storage locations, you can be sure your possessions are safe with us. Our storage facilities have 24-hour security, so nobody will ever be able to take your stuff but you. Several of them are open 24/7, too – so you’ll have access to your stuff whenever you need! Give us a call at 212-STORAGE for more information.

We were ecstatic this week to be included in New York Magazine’s famous Approval Matrix – along with the New York Legislature and NYC’s Pride parade. In fact, New York Magazine devoted a good amount of the grid to celebrating New York’s recently passed marriage equality legislation and related subjects; see if you can spot them all!

We couldn’t be happier for all the New York couples getting married this summer. That’s why on July 24^th, the first day that the new legislation for marriage equality takes effect, our Manhattan Mini Storage staff will be down at City Hall to congratulate them in person! We’ll be giving out flowers to newlyweds, taking photos and video, and – because combining households can often be a chaotic affair – offering 3 months of FREE storage to all same sex (and opposite sex) newlyweds!

Join us at City Hall on Sunday, July 24^th for the first day the Marriage Equality Act takes effect and help us toast to all the new couples! Follow us on Twitter or visit our Facebook page for updates on this fun upcoming event.