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, piloting villages and affordable building kits, making gardening and preservation accessible, paving legal pathways towards affordable rural housing, 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.
’The Center’ is where we share 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.
Replicatable community land-share models, real-world examples, and revolving loan funds.
Unions, guilds, co-ops, and communication channels between citizens, corperations, 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, 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 rigid, profit-first systems are celebrated in a small, connected communites.
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.
