2024 Summer Highlights & Upcoming Events

Upcoming Events:

This Saturday 8/24 we will be on the village green in Clinton, NY at the Clinton Art & Music Festival! Come visit our pop up thrift shop from 10am – 6pm where we will have a wide variety of secondhand arts and crafts supplies. Stick around to check out all of the amazing local art and music that will be there!

We will continue to be at our regular location every week at the Oneida County Public Market on Saturdays, from 9am – 1pm (except for Saturday 8/24, when we will be in Clinton)!

We will be back in Utica at the market, located at 321 Main Street, on August 31!

Donations

Learn about donating materials to Utica Creative Reuse on our Donate page! Your unwanted arts and crafts supplies find new homes through our art supply thrift store and our free art workshops, and your donation directly supports our mission.

Donation Drive for Art Therapy:

We are currently collecting donations of knitting needles, crochet needles, and yarn for a local art therapy group at Helio Health “making hats and blankets to give to the NICU.” You can drop off donations at any of our popup events, or contact us to arrange a drop off at another time! If you would like donate your supplies for this specific purpose, please label your donation “Helio Drive.”

Workshops

We had a busy summer popping up at the Oneida County Public Market, Utica Pride Festival, Rome Pride Fair, the Midtown Utica Community Center, and The Other Side Gallery during the Trash to Treasure Art Challenge! We also had tons of fun providing free art activities in the Kids’ Corner at Levitt Amp during 3 of their concerts, and collaborating with Sculpture Space on a box truck workshop with artist Xayvier Haughton. We saw over 200 people at our workshops between May and August 2024. Thank you to all who came out to learn a new skill with us and make art! We had an so much fun with you, and look forward to hosting more events like these in the future!

Visit our Reuse Resources page for crafting tutorials based on our workshops.

We are in the process of scheduling our fall workshop events. Stay tuned for more free workshops and events coming soon!

Organizational Updates

We began making our first sales in our thrift shop just 3 months ago on June 1, 2024. Thank you to all of our visitors! Our organization is funded by financial donations, grants, and proceeds from the sales of donated unwanted arts and crafts supplies. This funding helps to sustain our operations and makes it possible for us to continue keeping usable materials out of the landfill and advancing access to arts education in our community.

Thanks to many generous donations and the income from sales, we can now afford storage space so that we can continue to accept donations of unwanted materials! However, we need to find a permanent location in order to help more of these supplies find their forever homes. Our #1 fundraising goal is to establish a permanent creative reuse center in Utica, NY, so that we can accept more donations of materials, have a shop that is open regularly to the public, and hold more free workshops!

If you want to support our dream of establishing a permanent location, please join our Mohawk Valley Gives campaign next month! Every little bit helps us towards our goal, and even just by sharing information with your friends and family members about the work we do, you can help to make a difference!

Mohawk Valley Gives is a community-wide fundraising effort to support local nonprofit organizations. To participate, on Friday, September 20th, visit www.givemv.org and make a donation to Utica Creative Reuse and/or to any of the great participating nonprofit organizations in Mohawk Valley. All giving for this fundraising event will end at 11:59PM on September 22, so make sure to get your gift in on time!

If you have any questions or would like more information, please let us know.

Thank you for your generous support of our organization!

Save the Date:

Mohawk Valley Gives Fundraiser

Friday, September 20, 2024

Visit: https://www.givemv.org/organizations/utica-creative-reuse

Thank you to Our Volunteers!

Thank you to all our volunteers who did so much work in such hot weather this summer!