Center for Creative Repair
CCR is a living experiment in place-based community design. We prototype affordable, ecological, and locally-governed models for housing, health, education, cultural revival, infrastructure, and circular economies.
This is how we’re doing it:
1. Meeting Everyday Needs
We start with the basics: food, housing, and health.
Turning neglected land over to local stewards, designing affordable building kits, making gardening and preservation accessible to anybody, and piloting a new approaches to community care and health.
2. Creating Spaces to Learn, Grow, and Share
Once people are stable, they can learn skills, start ventures, and share culture.
Interactive classes that strengthen critical thinking and creativity, hands-on events with real-world impact, and performances that fund scholarships for emerging artists and change-makers.
3. Building the Tools to Support It
Behind the scenes, we make sure these systems can last and spread.
Digital tools for organizing, trade, and discussion.
San Juan County policy reform that prioritizes slow, ecological, and community-minded development over rules favoring wealthy developers.
Washington State law changes that limit tax escape and speculative housing, addresses tech-driven gentrification, and invest in local economies.
Unions, guilds, and communication channels between citizens and lawmakers.
How it all connects
Food, housing, and healthcare ensures people are cared for.
Meeting these basic needs frees time for education and culture, which keep knowledge alive and community reciprocity strong.
Policy shifts and innovative technologies strengthen local economies and support small-scale collaborations, ensuring the model reaches those who need it the most.
Who, What, Where, When, and Why?
We have watched friends and family fall through systems that were never built for them. Housing, healthcare, and social services continue to fail people who are sensitive, overworked, or already on the margins, while rural places in the Pacific Northwest are reshaped by outside money and short-term thinking.
The tools we need already exist, but they are scattered and underfunded. Our own experiences with illness, burnout, and housing precarity make the stakes clear: if we do not repair the foundations, more people will keep falling through.
This is why the Center for Creative Repair exists. Not to imagine a perfect world, but to build practical, caring systems that let people stay, heal, and thrive in the one we live in now.
Orcas Island is the right place for this work. It is full of creative, skilled, and eccentric people who hold each other accountable and know how to make things work. Many come here after failing to fit into rigid systems, and stay because they find another way.
The San Juan Islands are a perfect testing ground. If we can connect the skills, resources, and imaginations here, we can create a model others can learn from.
Instead of importing problems, let’s export solutions.
