Center for Creative Repair
This 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.
Center for Creative Repair is an organization on Orcas Island for makers, artists, builders, growers, local workers, families, and other problem-solvers who need practical ways to live, make, learn, and contribute. Through a central makerspace in Eastsound, classes, farmshares, collaborative projects, rural housing models, policy proposals, and developing tools for local resilience, CCR is building real-world systems that support creative work, affordable living, land stewardship, and stronger local economies. Some parts are active now, some are being built, and all of it is aimed at creating innovative opportunities for residents who are often priced out of housing, workspace, and the ability to build a life where they live.
Forest and farmland secured for Makers Villages. Site work is in progress, and electrical infrastructure installed.
Makerspace in town rented
Curriculum established
2026 rule changes submitted
Consulting with cities and counties across Western Washington on community development opportunities
Fiscal sponsorship and 501(c)(3) status in process
Village builders, instructors, and coordinators housed
Loan fund in development
Technological infrastructure in development
Practical and innovative building methods being researched and implemented.
How it all connects
Local food systems and affordable housing, support health and ensure people are cared for.
Meeting these basic needs frees time for education and culture, which keep knowledge alive and community reciprocity strong.
Policy shifts, replicatable rent-to-own models, community centers, and innovative technologies strengthen local economies and support collaborations, ensuring the model reaches those who need it the most.
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, all while the Pacific Northwest is being 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. Its small population makes accountability unavoidable, and despite challenging conditions, residents have continued to honor the ecology over convenience.
The San Juan Islands are full of creative, skilled, and eccentric people. Drawn in by the wildlife and flourishing landscapes, they stay after realizing that the same traits punished in a in a rigid, profit-first system are celebrated in a small, connected community.
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.
