ReUse celebrates 15 years of building community

Late last month, Finger Lakes ReUse celebrated its 15-year anniversary as a nonprofit, a milestone that’s more than just a birthday to both ReUse leaders and supports alike.

According to a recent press release, the nonprofit Finger Lakes ReUse started in October of 2007 “with only a handful of employees and a pooled investment of $700.” As Executive Director Diane Cohen told Tompkins Weekly back in January (tinyurl.com/2xvd2yl2), the county’s first reuse center — ReUse’s North Triphammer Road location — opened in 2008, the result of a collaboration between Cohen, Barb Eckstrom of Tompkins County Recycling and Materials Management and other community supporters.

Now, ReUse has grown considerably in size and scope, currently employing over 90 people and offering multiple community-benefit programs across its two locations (214 Elmira Rd. and 2255 N. Triphammer Rd.).

As Associate Director Robin Elliott explained, ReUse leadership sees the nonprofit as providing a crucial service to the community, one they’re hoping other communities emulate.

“I think about just family members and friends who live in places that don’t have a place where you can easily donate materials that you no longer have use for or find affordable used versions of things or even programs that we offer,” she said. “It’s a special thing that we have, and [we’d] love for other places to have it. And that’s something that, talking about a vision of what is it like for a community to be sustainable and resilient and good for the people that live within it, this is one piece of it for sure. This is the kind of thing that a community needs.”

Cohen said that she’s seen how much of an impact the programs ReUse offers can have on people.

“I’ve spent a lot of time observing,” she said. “Initially, it was observing how others newly tasked with helping us out, possibly having to do community service hours or something like that, and watching their demeanor transform through the course of the day — their sense of accomplishment and showing up kind of down and out and, at the end, having a sense of pride. And watching that transformation happen and realizing there’s this transformative power that’s innate to the action of reuse itself — self-empowerment and reuse, they go together.”

Cohen and Elliott expressed both surprise and excitement over how much the community has taken a chance on ReUse — and how much that has paid off “exponentially,” as Elliott put it.

“One of the constant challenges is not having enough space,” Cohen said. “So, more stuff gets donated, we get better at processing, and all of a sudden, our shelves are too crammed, and our warehouse space isn’t big enough.”

Just in the past few years, ReUse has taken big steps to meet the growing demand, including opening its (now closed) ReUse Caboose and Training Center in 2020 (tinyurl.com/2ytczyct) and expanding its Triphammer Mall location into another storefront to form the ReUse MegaCenter in 2021.

“In April 2020, … Finger Lakes ReUse’s Board of Directors allowed us to sign a lease to more than double in size,” Cohen said in reference to the MegaCenter. “Fast forward two and a half years, we’re demonstrating how rich a resource having the space is for the community. It’s not just for the organization’s benefit or business case; it’s because the material is out there. And so, I think that’s been a constant. We’ve doubled in size in 2010 [and] in 2015, when we bought Ithaca ReUse Center.”

Along with ReUse’s growth especially in the last five years has come a growing interest in reuse from other organizations and individuals in the community, Cohen said.

“[It] kind of seems like there’s this massive rising of consciousness around the importance of this and how the impacts kind of resonate or the ripple effect of the simple act of reuse,” she said. “By being able to participate in the act of reuse, I think it appeals to people on that deeply intuitive [level]. People feel very connected to this. So, the passion around what we’re doing is another thing that’s continued to grow significantly.”

While that development is encouraging, Elliott added that one of the challenges ReUse has been facing for a few years, especially since the pandemic hit, is the increasing need for social supports and services for community members.

“We talk a lot about the materials coming at us, but the need for access to affordable goods, access to goods in general — since supply is limited and prices are going up all over, understandably — and the need for support, poverty relief, job training, a place to have community and connection, those are all going up and up, not just here, everywhere,” she said. “I’m grateful to work in a place that can help address a piece of that. But I know that it’s only one piece of the solution. And it’s a complex problem that our community all has to work together to solve.”

Still, Cohen said that one positive in recent months has been a significant improvement in ReUse’s operations, where leaders don’t feel like they’re constantly scrambling to keep up.

“Especially since the pandemic, the volume of material really spiked, and it created a great strain on the organization,” she said. “And yet, it feels like, [after being] under tremendous pressure for a sustained two years, we’re finally turning the corner over the last few months, and we’ve got even better systems; we’re more efficient.”

Looking back on ReUse’s history, Elliott said staff made sure to celebrate the 15-year milestone, but now, the real focus is on the future.

“It’s an interesting moment to acknowledge for sure,” she said. “It feels like in some ways the organization has grown so far from day one to here. And also, it feels like we’re still a very young organization that has so much more growth to go to. And to me, it just makes me want to think about, well, what’s the next 15 years going to look like? It’s a sort of exciting moment to celebrate.”

Cohen said the nonprofit will be working over the next year to figure out its plans for the next five years. But whatever those plans look like, Cohen said, “It won’t be more of the same; it will be more.” Elliott shared that sentiment.

“If we can get that next level of investment to really get to that more stable size and more appropriate size for what’s coming us, then that’ll be really exciting because then we can show that to any place that will listen,” Elliott said. “No matter what version it ends up looking like, I know that there’s going to be a point where, we’re already sharing out, but we’re going to be able to even demonstrate that much more clearly what’s possible.”

To learn more about ReUse, visit its website at ithacareuse.org.

Jessica Wickham is the managing editor of Tompkins Weekly. Send story ideas to them at editorial@VizellaMedia.com.