On a slightly tangential level, The New England Miniature Painters Association has our (somewhat) monthly painting get-togethers at local hobby shops, and we're not shy about grabbing anybody who stops to look and sticking a brush in their hand. We always keep a few random plastic minis on hand to give people who want to stop by and paint with us. My friend's kid has a bit of a complicated home life, so a couple years ago I took him on as my painting apprentice. Of course, he's since gone on to use those skills for decorating his Nerf gun mods, but... < rolls eyes >
The folks on the Reaper Miniatures forums are awesome people. It's not uncommon for somebody to be getting nostalgic about some favorite mini they had back in the day and wishing they still had it, only for them to find a package in their mailbox a week later containing someone's "extra" copy of it. We also do a "Box of Goodwill", in which everyone who signs up is divided into a number of groups and one person in each group takes a bunch of their stuff, packs it into a box and sends it out to another person, who then takes a few things out and replaces them with some of their own stuff, and sends the box on to the next person on the list. At the end of the rotation the box goes back to the original person so they can take something out. We encourage folks who are newer to the hobby to take out far more than they put in, as most of us old grognards have more stuff than we'll ever paint in two lifetimes. It's a great way to discover minis from companies you've never heard of, or maybe even end up with some hard-to-find old mini that a collector might drool over.
Several of the people there have have been gifted with minis made to look like their forum avatars. When I was dead broke and unemployed during one of the Reaper Bones Kickstarters, and mentioned that I was skipping it due to my financial state, someone put money in my PayPal account so I could get some stuff I wanted. Recently, when I wasn't able to shuffle money around in time to get a limited edition figure, another forum member used a gift certificate they had to buy it for me.
My local FLGS is a place called the Citadel Game Cellar in Groton, CT...
The Citadel has been a local fixture for going on four decades now, and there are quite a number of folks like myself that are lifers at the store. (I've known the original owner, Pat, since I was 15, longer than I've known anyone else outside my immediate family.)
When Pat announced that the store was going to be moving to it's current location a few years ago and asked for help with the move...
Nearly a dozen people showed up the first weekend with four vehicles. We had the store all packed up and cleaned by the end of the weekend, and by the next weekend all the shelving and merchandise was in place at the new store and the register was open for business.
Pat held a drawing to give away an official D&D Dragon Chess Set (I happened to win it), and a couple of us walked away with some old gaming stuff we found in the basement that Pat just gave us for helping him out. (I ended up with a good-sized stack of 1st Ed. modules.)
When Pat was running his 4E campaign after-hours at the store, I brought in my entire collection of DDM minis for the game to use, at a vague guess somewhere over three hundred of them. I left them at the store after I dropped out of the game so they could keep using them. I only played in that game for about two months, but at least a decade later they're still using the minis for their games at the store.
And I imagine I'm not the only one who's given away more dice over the thirty-five years I've been playing than I currently own...
(And I own a fair number of dice.)
Edit:
If any of you folks remember the old "What Do YOU Think My Character looks like?" thread on the WotC forums, you'd probably recognize my screenname as one of the long-running contributors and eventual custodian of that thread...
