by Jackie Kirouac-Fram, Executive Director
Last year at this time, we wrote to you about all we had accomplished and what we were planning for 2023. Your response was so enthusiastic, we’re doing it again!
With your support as financial donors, material donors, customers, and students, we more than accomplished what we said we would do in 2023:
Launching our Home Repair for All Program: ACCOMPLISHED!
This fall, we officially launched this exciting program, which provides FREE home repair classes and materials for six months to income-qualified homeowners in our community. Participants receive full, free access to our full suite of classes, up to $500 in materials from our store (which, with our prices, is a lot of material!), and a monthly group meeting with guest speakers to learn with, and build relationships with, other homeowners in the group.
This program is entirely funded by donations from private individuals, the Bank of America Foundation, the Collins Foundation, and the Henry Lea Hillman, Jr. Foundation. We look forward to telling you more about the outcomes of this program next year!
Kicking off our Community Membership: ACCOMPLISHED!
You might know that we offer paid memberships as a way for our community to support our work while receiving some excellent benefits. This year, we started extending those benefits to income-qualified folks who can benefit most from the discounts, free pick-ups and deliveries, free classes, and access to Open Shop that we offer our Maker Members. Currently, we have five active Community Members!
This program is funded by our paying members, so for every $2,000 we raise in Maker Memberships, we open one more Community Membership spot. Just one more way our Members are supporting our community!
We also did few other awesome things…
We re-launched youth programming for the first time since 2018. In addition to regularly scheduled youth classes in carpentry, we launched our first-ever summer camp for teens! Students learned the basic carpentry and electrical skills necessary to create a handmade lamp, and their reviews of the experience were absolutely glowing (and if you know a teen, you know how hard it can be to impress!).
We are currently seeking funding to be able to offer FREE classes and summer camps for income-qualified youth in 2024 – cross your fingers for us!
We advanced and formalized our equity and inclusion policy and created some wonderful signage to let our guests know how to help us maintain a safe, welcoming environment for all.
All of this work is funded entirely by donations of financial support. You can help us live into our vision of climate, economic, and housing justice through reuse and repair.
Please consider joining us today by making a gift of any amount to our ReBuilding for Justice Campaign.
Thank you for all the love this year!