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? How can we make the best use of our materials to support economic justice and climate resilience?
Over the past two years, the ReBuilding Center team worked together to consider these weighty questions, and we’ve made some decisions that we’re excited to share with you!
First and foremost, ReBuilding Center affirms our commitment to the creation of an anti-racist economy, one based in sharing and abundance and equity, rather than strategies of extraction and exploitation that support the continued oppression of Black, Indigenous and people of color.
What does that mean exactly?
It means centering the needs, voices, and concerns of BIPOC, low-income, and other excluded communities in the design and delivery of our work going forward.
It means helping people repair their homes so they can maintain their safety and ownership.
It means raising the funds that will allow us to donate more materials to people who need them.
It means offering more classes that support renters’ needs, and more classes that teach skills homeowners can use right away to affordably maintain their homes.
It means ensuring our store is useful, accessible, welcoming, and supportive of Black, Indigenous, and people of color living with low incomes who need or want to repair their homes.
It means exploring things like item delivery to support people who are transit-dependent and sourcing new, higher-quality, code-compliant materials for home repairs.
It means all of this and so much more.
It also means that we need you, our community, to help us do this work.
Keep an eye out for our upcoming newsletters, as we explore the what, how, and why of this exciting vision for change… and the what, how, and why you can be a part of it.
Stay tuned, and thank you!