Joyful shopping and learning experiences make ReBuilding Center a special place – for our guests, our students, our customers, and our staff, from finding exactly what you’ve been looking for (or didn’t know you needed!) to learning the practical magic of home repair. Unfortunately, it’s not always so joyful. As a result, we developed our Inclusion Policy, ensuring an environment where everyone feels safe, welcomed, and respected
Everyone who wants to learn is welcome at ReBuilding Center! Recognizing that cost may be a factor for some, we prioritized keeping our class prices low. As of November 1, we will be raising prices by $5 per class hour to cover the true costs of hosting in-person classes, to develop new classes, and to purchase safe and reliable shop tools. However, to maintain and EXTEND access to all, ReBuilding Center is proud to introduce our NEW Community Membership program.
Joyful shopping and learning experiences make ReBuilding Center a special place – for our guests, our students, our customers, and our staff, from finding exactly what you’ve been looking for (or didn’t know you needed!) to learning the practical magic of home repair. Unfortunately, it’s not always so joyful. As a result, we developed our Inclusion Policy, ensuring an environment where everyone feels safe, welcomed, and respected
Everyone who wants to learn is welcome at ReBuilding Center! Recognizing that cost may be a factor for some, we prioritized keeping our class prices low. As of November 1, we will be raising prices by $5 per class hour to cover the true costs of hosting in-person classes, to develop new classes, and to purchase safe and reliable shop tools. However, to maintain and EXTEND access to all, ReBuilding Center is proud to introduce our NEW Community Membership program.
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.
On July 11th, ReBuilding Center partnered with the African American Alliance for Homeownership (AAAH) for our seventh annual Day of Service event. Over 40 community volunteers assisted five Black homeowners throughout North and Northeast Portland neighborhoods!
Becoming a ReBuilding Center Member means that not only do you get a bunch of cool new ReBuilding Center benefits, you get to support housing justice through the newest aspect of our Membership program: Community Membership, supported by members like you!
It’s Earth Month! And since Earth is our one and only home, there’s no better time to talk about the strong connection between housing and climate justice. Healthy, decent, affordable, sustainable housing MUST be at the core of the climate transition. However, we’ve begun to see some challenges in this work.
People will be coming back to the office after more than two years of remote work, which means teams across America are going to be relearning how to be together in person, how to make small talk, how to hang out in an office environment, and how to be okay with these changes. It’s going to be weird.
Believe it or not, ReBuilding Center can help.
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?”
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.
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.
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?
Today’s Finds is a weekly collection of some of our favorite items from the ReBuilding Center store! Are you signed up to receive the Finds via e-mail? Sign up below or, if you already receive our newsletter, update your preferences in MailChimp.
Did you see an item on the Finds and claimed it for your own? We love seeing your reuse projects! Share with us at info@rebuildingcenter.org.
July 27th Finds
July 21st Finds
July 13th Finds
All items are subject to availability.
We cannot guarantee that the items shown here will be available when you arrive. Call our store with any questions: 503-331-1877
People have been reusing and repairing things forever. Like, literally since the dawn of humankind. But over the past century, big business has taught most Americans that new is best, reuse is only if necessary, sharing is weird, and repair is just too difficult.
As a result, we consume and throw away more things now than ever before, depleting the Earth of precious resources, depriving people of precious land, and locating our ever-growing waste and pollution in ever-closer proximity to BIPOC communities and communities with low incomes.
For 24 years, ReBuilding Center has helped people re-learn that reuse and repair are not only possible, but they’re also joyous, self-sustaining, and political practices.
Making reclaimed materials and repair skills available and affordable creates economic resilience for people with low incomes, reduces the extraction of natural resources, and helps create an alternative economy that challenges the scarcity mindset that capitalism and racism rely on.
We fundraise with our community because we strive to keep our prices as low as possible, and we dream of a day when we’ve raised enough money in donations and memberships to allow us to just give away most of our materials. That would be amazing, and a significant example of the type of sharing economy that we are working toward. We're small, but we can help lead the way.
You can join us in making this dream a reality by shopping with us, donating materials to us, taking classes with us, volunteering with us, or becoming a ReBuilding Center member. Your gifts of time, talent, and financial resources will fuel our work toward climate justice. Thank you!
