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!

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.