What’s one of the most commonly encountered types of reused items in the United States? Cars! So, why do people reuse cars so frequently and willingly in a country where encouragement to purchase new items is everywhere? Are people buying used cars because they care deeply about avoiding the resource extraction required to make a new car? Is the climate crisis fueling the used car market? Hardly. 

Healthy, affordable, sustainable housing must be at the core of climate justice, and home repair moves us toward that goal. So, in 2023, we are going to start giving some of these reusable materials away!

With your support, we accomplished a lot in 2022! We thought you would appreciate a Progress Report on how far we’ve come! 

Last year, we at ReBuilding Center shared how we can build on our strengths to help interrupt the environmental, racial, and economic injustice that continue to fuel our climate crisis. We invited you to join us in this work, and you did. Thank you!

At ReBuilding Center, equity, accessibility, home repair education, and waste reduction are pillars of climate justice. But what holds us together is our culture of scrappiness and joy in what we do. Creative reuse, be it in art, craft, or design, is a reflection of this ethos, of our belief that sustainable living can be fun as well as responsible.

As a climate justice organization that works our tails off to reduce the climate effects of wasteful production and consumption by making reuse and repair both super cool and super affordable, we are excited!

ReBuilding Center is excited to announce a new program to help BIPOC homeowners and homeowners with disabilities repair and retain their homes. No one should lose their home because they cannot afford to make repairs, so we’ve partnered with the Environmental Protection Agency and the City of Portland to help make critical home repairs possible for folx!

This year, we at ReBuilding Center grew to see ourselves as a climate justice organization. Since our founding nearly 25 years ago, ReBuilding Center has prided itself on the amount of material we keep out of landfills. But until recently, we didn’t talk about how reuse and repair can be tools for justice.

For decades, the decision to buy new has been made ever easier by cheap goods with hidden social and environmental costs. We feel the true costs of this more everyday, as our climate worsens, our landfills grow, and our air and water become increasingly polluted. As individuals, we long to answer the question: “what can we do?”

Fundamentally, ReBuilding Center provides affordable reclaimed materials and home-repair classes so people can sustainably mend and improve their homes. But the ripple effects of this work strengthen our community’s resilience even further.

The practice of reuse and repair is a practice of sharing. It inspires a sense of interconnectedness, a feeling that we are all part of a continuum, creating something new together. We celebrate this joyful reciprocity as an important path toward equity, justice, and caring. This is the heart of COMMUNITY.

Repair is empowerment. It is the confidence of learning a new skill, the satisfaction of a job well done. It is tending your home, be it an apartment or a house. It is caring for your belongings so they last.

At ReBuilding Center, our materials re-vision the past into a piece of tomorrow. When we choose to donate rather than discard, when we choose to renew rather than buy new, we choose to be part of a community of makers and sharers. EVERYONE is welcome, so we keep prices affordable, but the simple truth is that barriers to reuse remain.

As we head into our 25th anniversary year, the staff and board of ReBuilding Center are asking how we can build on our strengths to help interrupt the environmental, racial, and economic injustice that continue to fuel our climate crisis. What can we do?

Materials are the message. For nearly 25 years, we’ve championed waste diversion and reuse, taking in material donations from our community (thank you!) and circulating them back into the hands of builders, makers, and DIYers. Over time, we began to ask ourselves, how can we best serve people in our community?