The WasteShed is turning 10: Celebrating a Decade of Decay!
In the 10 years of The WasteShed’s existence, we have become a vital part of Chicago’s creative ecosystem…rather like a fungus.
The WasteShed: Embracing Entropy Since 2014
The WasteShed serves hundreds of schools and nonprofits across Chicagoland and beyond
Hear us out! Creative Reuse Centers like The WasteShed perform a vital and unglamorous role in their local creative community. Materials and resources that are released from local businesses, artist studios, schools, craft rooms and other arts organizations, are absorbed, processed and made available to other entities in the artistic and educational biome.
Like fungi, the true scale and impact of a creative reuse center is difficult to perceive, and even harder to measure. Materials that have passed through The WasteShed have permeated to the furthest reaches of the city and far beyond; our low-cost materials quietly sustaining the art closets and afterschool programs of hundreds of cash-strapped schools, helping small businesses cut costs for necessary items, brightening summer festivals and winter holidays, and providing an unending source of surprise, curiosity and even mystification for our visitors.
What you see on the surface (a thrift store full of art supplies and related items) is the momentary, ever-shifting manifestation of thousands of relationships, collaborations, collections, inspirations, frustrations, visions and sometimes delusions — the dreams of the city, a living, dying, shifting mass, at once beautiful and overwhelming.
we love to rot
🍄
we love to rot 🍄
And us! We’re the folks on the forest floor, resolving an uncountable number of curious and mundane tangles (176 tons to date) into re-consumable form (an estimated $3.5 million worth of cool stuff not landfilled). We are continuously creating new systems in response to new input and new demands, hosting and organizing many dozens of accessible creative programs every year, building programs and innovative partnerships with like-minded local organizations. And we are doing this… on a shoestring budget as thin as a mycelium filament.
Help us keep blooming into our second decade!
The WasteShed is living proof that it is possible to be a Chicago institution, a hidden gem, a pillar of our community, and utterly precarious, at one and the same time. We are asking our community to help us raise $30,000 by September 30th. Please donate today to support our work, and help us operate from a place of abundance, as we create abundance for those around us.
Thank you for being there for us all these years.