In Memoriam: Rebuilding Exchange, 2009 - 2025
Yesterday, the Rebuilding Exchange, The WasteShed's partner organization at our Evanston location and the largest nonprofit materials reuse organization in Chicago, announced it was closing its doors, effective immediately.
The end of RX is an immeasurable loss, not only to the employees, trainees, and volunteers who put their backs into the hard work of salvage and repurposing, or even to the constellation of small businesses, construction companies, design firms, DIYers and dreamers who constitute their extended community. In the midwest, Rebuilding Exchange stood for an idea: reuse as infrastructure, a systematic, scaleable, and reality-based approach to stemming the unceasing flood of materials, representing both irreplaceable natural resources and human time and skill, into the landfill.
As founder of The WasteShed, Rebuilding Exchange supported me professionally and personally as a member of Chicago's reuse community in innumerable ways. I can’t speak to the experience of being Rebuilding Exchange staff, board, or even a volunteer; I never so much as denailed a single board or racked a piece of lumber, but here is a short list of the things RX has done for me, and for reuse in Chicago:
Eleanor in the Ashland location of the Rebuilding Exchange circa 2013, there were classic cars there for some reason. Sorry I’ve lost the photo credit for this one.
RX was the home of the initial Creative Reuse Warehouse popup, spearheaded by Marianne Fairbanks and Emily Boksenbaum on behalf of the Resource Center , that formed the basis for The WasteShed. I turned up in 2012 and acted like I knew things, and was given the job of General Manager of the space between two columns up against the woodshop (imagine sawdust everywhere, and dust blowing in from Ashland Avenue and the metra line through broken and leaky windows).
Some kind of madly overcrowded food popup event
Meegan Czop, Floor Manager of the Rebuilding Exchange and later owner of Great Lakes Yard, taught me the important skill of refusing inappropriate donations in my first week, when we had to almost physically restrain my employer, Ken Dunn, who I had never previously met, from dropping off a full dumptruck load of art shipping crates from the Art Institute, which could not physically fit in our designated space. (I took 3)
The art shipping crates from the Art Institute. Gorgeous, but no thank you. With apologies to the many people who knew and loved Ken, but if you knew him you know this is a true story.
The end of the beginning.
The CRW popup at the Rebuilding Exchange collapsed after a few months, but I met most of my initial board members and volunteers through that experience. I taught mending classes in the Lion’s Den, met with the Illinois Reuse Alliance, and collected like-minded nerds for tours of reuse organizations and businesses with The Young and The Reuseless.
Elise Zelechowski, founder of the Rebuilding Exchange, came up with the name for The WasteShed, a concept within materials management to express the idea that the way discarded materials move towards the landfill is like water in a watershed moving towards the sea (except they don’t cycle back).
Many of The WasteShed’s original fixtures, including a shelf made of hollow-core doors by Alex Enarson that is still in our Humboldt Park location, came from RX.
Flash forward some years, and the Executive Director of Evanston Rebuilding Warehouse, Aina Gutierrez, was instrumental in the opening of our Evanston location in their new warehouse on Dempster in 2021. When the Evanston Rebuilding Warehouse merged with Rebuilding Exchange and became… Rebuilding Exchange, I found myself once again working in a corner of the Rebuilding Exchange, leading me to make this totally unintelligible joke I was very proud of.
Well, we’re back in the car again from Jurassic Park
I really cannot sufficiently express my gratitude to Aina for her mentorship and support from the time we met in 2019 til now. She taught me the little I know about fundraising and Executive Directoring at scale, and it’s thanks to her (and Tom Mulhern, and others) that we came very close to getting a massive, game-changing EPA grant via the Inflation Reduction Act in 2024, which would have brought Chicago into a new age of sustainable economic development.
I am grateful now that we did not get the EPA funding, as it almost certainly would have been clawed back, as the Rebuilding Exchange’s multi-million dollar federal grant was at the beginning of this year, contributing largely to the situation that has inspired this TLDR memoir of my relationship with an organization I was never officially a part of.
At our Evanston location, The WasteShed is in the position of survivors of a disaster that could easily have taken us as well, and still might without a swift and powerful community response. We can’t afford to lose our northern location, and we very much appreciate your donation to help us weather this transition.
Our landlord has been very supportive, but the loss of an anchor tenant is a major event and no one currently knows what’s next. If you are looking for 32k sf of warehouse space in Evanston, please get in touch!
I think an important thing to add is that reuse centers never die. Anyone who has been into a reuse center, be it for building materials or creative reuse, becomes subtly but completely aware of a reality: we must, and we can, change the way we do everything, from building a house to teaching a child, in order to protect the future.
This knowledge is active in every person reading this, and latent in hundreds of thousands of casual visitors who stopped by for a lamp or a cabinet over the course of Rebuilding Exchange’s existence. Every one of those people can do something to make the world better, and I believe that they will.
We have attempted to match Rebuilding Exchange’s incredible generosity in supporting other community efforts that reach out to us for support or advice, and it is truly a high standard to live up to. With love, solidarity, and absolute sympathy for everyone who has been impacted by this loss,
Eleanor Ray
Founder and Executive Director
The WasteShed