Mission Statement
New Orleans Creative Reuse aims to encourage creativity, civic engagement and environmental stewardship by diverting goods from landfills with the intention of repurposing them as arts and crafts materials, emphasizing accessibility to all in the community.
What is a Creative Reuse Center?
Creative Reuse isn’t a new concept to New Orleans — we are lucky to have Ric Rack (textile reuse) and The Green Project (home and building materials) and want to fill in the gap for the materials their organizations don’t accept. Creative Reuse centers are often described as an “arts and crafts thrift shop” where usable materials and goods are donated by individuals and companies, sorted, processed and made available for sale in the store to the public. These materials cover a wide array of art mediums, crafts, hobbies — a small example would be party decor (plates, napkins, balloons, banners), paper ephemera (magazines, scrapbook supplies, stickers, greeting cards, wrapping and tissue paper), miscellaneous plastic toys or gameboard pieces, and wooden parts for assemblage artists, ceramics for mosaic artists, etc.
In addition to being a retail space, a creative reuse center is a place of education and community building. Workshops and classes to learn new skills would be offered in the space — everything from making zines to paper mache to jewelry making.
These kinds of events would be available for everyone in the community – the general public, students and schools, as well as clubs, organizations and groups.
We aren’t looking to reinvent the wheel — we are looking to replicate the model that so many creative reuse centers we’ve been lucky to visit or volunteer with in other places like Scrap SF (San Francisco, CA), The East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse (Oakland, CA) , Remainders (Pasadena, CA) and Turnip Green (Nashville, TN) have built, and we encourage you to visit their websites to find out more about their missions, their programs, their retail spaces, sustainability efforts and community impact.
What do we need?
We are in the earliest stages — we see the need, we think we know the demand, we just aren’t sure how to get from step A to step B. We are hoping to assemble folks with backgrounds in non-profit work, co-ops, mutual aid organizing, sustainability, financial literacy, real estate connections, artists, educators, crafters.
Maybe you have a family friend that has a warehouse space in Jefferson or Orleans Parish and is looking for a tenant.
Maybe you’ve done fundraising for your kids’ school and you’d like to take that responsibility on.
Maybe you work in arts education and would love to take on developing programing for events and workshops.
Maybe you are a grant writer or looking to become one and this mission feels aligned with your values. You know what fiscal sponsorship is and how to pursue it.
There are lots of avenues of connection here, and we want to nurture and pursue all of them!
Okay, what next?
After you’ve filled out our form telling us about yourself and how you’d like to help, we want to get folks in the same room to chat it out — we need to see what the response is to this outreach, but we’ll go from there!
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