OUR VISION
The Tool Shed is a community commons where people access tools, teach and learn skills, collaborate on projects, and design and implement solutions to the challenges of our community, ensuring our sustainability through the redevelopment of our common wealth.
MISSION
It is our belief that rather than ‘keeping up with the Joneses,’ we should be collaborating with them. Life-long learners and life-long teachers, everyone in the community has something to share and something to learn. The Tool Shed will be a place where people and organizations in the community can come together to share tools, skills, and dreams. A laboratory of creativity and collaboration, we will create grass-roots solutions to the challenges we face, we will develop self-confidence and self-sufficiency, we will perform art and engineering and design and building and growing and learning – together.
Sharing Skills and Tools
The Tool Shed will be a tool lending library, maintaining an inventory of tools from hammers to hacksaws, from pliers to pressure washers, from channel locks to cement mixers. Every person in the community is then able to come check out those tools, just as they check books out from the public library. This enables people without the financial means or the storage capacity to have access to tools to work on projects that will improve their lives, increase the livability of their homes, create more beautiful and fruitful landscapes, keep their automobiles and bicycles on the road, etc. It also makes it easier, as individuals and as a community, to focus on the first two R’s – Reduce and Reuse – decreasing the amount of waste in our recycling system and our landfills.
Skills and knowledge are also important parts of the resource sharing economy that the Tool Shed supports. We will be a hub where those who know can teach those who do not. Through project-based educational opportunities, more of us can be self-sufficient, know how to take care of things in an emergency, work to decrease our carbon footprints, and even just learn new skills that give us pleasure. Each of us is both teacher and student, and everyone will be encouraged to share what they know with others.
Nurturing Ideas & Visions and Collaborating on Projects
When people come together in a safe atmosphere of respect and positive reinforcement, they voice their ideas with confidence. Sharing these ideas helps to clarify them and makes room for feedback to improve those ideas. Through both the Board of Directors and through the membership, people will be encouraged to bring their vision and their ideas to the group and talk them out. The Tool Shed will be a place that says YES, you can do what you dream. Let’s figure out how to make it happen together.
Through classroom and shop space, members from the community will be able to collaborate on projects such as building open-source hardware, making real improvements to their neighborhoods, creating art, etc. The most meaningful and transformative education happens in collaboration, and the connections people will make at the Tool Shed will strengthen our community’s independence and our inter-dependence.
The Tool Shed 