#so i work in a tiny nonprofit thrift store. right. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thegreenwolf · 5 years

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[Originally posted at my blog, A Sense of Natural Wonder, at http://www.thegreenwolf.com/how-i-store-more-art-supplies-than-i-know-what-to-do-with/]

So I had a special request from one of my Patrons over on Patreon. They wanted to get some advice on storing art supplies, which sounds simpler than it actually is. See, if you're an artist, you probably have a tendency to buy way more supplies than you actually need in the moment, often spurred on by creative impulses that say "Hey, look at this neat thing--you could TOTALLY make something out of it!" Which is how, over the years, I have ended up with everything from a vintage floorstanding radio to a full-sized taxidermy hyena to way more tchotchke shelves than anyone has any business owning.

Having been a hide and bone artist for two decades has at least given me the opportunity to figure out how to best store lots of big, bulky supplies like fur coats and antlers. Now, I am not one of those people who has an entire basement floor to work with, with walls full of shelves holding a hundred identical plastic tubs, each neatly labeled in legible handwriting. You won't see my studio in a magazine extolling "Twenty Enviable Artists' Spaces." But I've made do with a whole bunch of living situations for me and my stuff.

[Not everything may fit perfectly, and that's okay. As long as you can keep everything within a certain set of boundaries without stuff falling over regularly, you're good to go.]

The first thing you need to think about when stashing your art supplies is the space you have to work with. My living quarters have ranged from a single bedroom to a spacious two bedroom apartment. Storage has been everything from tiny closets to the laundry room. These days my current studio includes not only part of a house but a loft in a barn for storage as well. (I am incredibly spoiled, believe you me.)

You're going to have to be realistic about the space available to you, especially if you live with other people. It's tempting to just let it all hang out, so to speak, but that's not really fair to anyone besides you in your creative moments. So assess what space you can reasonably have for your supplies. It's best to focus on out of the way spots like closets, shelves, and back rooms that don't get that much traffic. This isn't just to keep things out of the way, but also because these spaces are good for keeping things more or less contained.

Next, you need things to keep things in. I am a big fan of plastic bins and milk crates. They're boxy, easy to stack and easy to move around, and are often abundant in thrift stores. I mean, if you really need all your bins to match you can go to any general-stuff store and pick up a bunch of the same type, but I have poached mine from all sorts of sources, even free piles on the side of the road after someone has moved. They're mismatched, but they work pretty well.

Soft, squishy things lend themselves well to being stuffed in bins, like the ones in the picture at the beginning of this post. Most of mine are full of fur and leather scraps of varying sizes and sorts. I also have a few that are full of assorted smaller odds and ends, like shells and feathers and so forth. Keep in mind that the bigger the bin the more stuff you can fit, but the more you also have to sort through to find that one tiny thing that inevitably has fallen to the very bottom. You can also put hard, awkward things like antlers and bones in bins, though you may have to play a little Tetris to get them to fit right.

[This part of my studio is a work in progress. These are bins that either haven't made it into the barn yet, are full of really fragile art, or have things I need often enough that they need to stay at the house. Note also the stacks of milk crates.]

Crates work well for smaller hard, awkward things. However, my favorite use for them is as storage for stacks of jewelry organizing boxes. These are those shallow tray-like boxes with little dividers in them that are perfect for beads, fishing lures, hardware, and other teeny little easily-lost items. One milk crate will typically hold a stack of five, and then you can stuff some baggies of other stuff in along the side. Make sure that you don't put things in above the top edge, or else they won't stack properly. I use the very top crate in a stack for stuff that won't fit neatly and might stick out the top. I don't like to stack more than four crates up as they can get tipsy otherwise. (Plus it's a pain having to unstack and restack them every time you want something from the bottom crate--which is a great reason to put the things you use the most in a crate higher up the stack.)

Not everything is perfectly neat, of course. I also have a shelving unit full of oddly-shaped cardboard boxes, and stacks of more boxes, and bags of packing materials, and so forth. But I make everything more or less fit, and since a lot of that stuff is either packing materials or destashed art supplies just waiting for someone to buy them, most of what's there is temporary. (Don't feel bad if you can't make everything you have fit into neat boxes, so long as you can keep it basically contained.)

I also am fortunate enough to have a decent work bench. I have some small benchtop shelves for things I use a fair amount like adhesives and tools. The rest of the bench....well...the condition of that depends on how busy I've been. But having a flat surface that is reserved for my work helps keep it somewhat contained. If you can have a table that isn't shared with other things (like, you know, meals) make the best use of it you can. Otherwise, put your stuff away as soon as you're done working so that you stay in the habit of keeping things neat.

One more thing: it's really important to reorganize and declutter on a regular basis; you can either sell or donate whatever you cull. If you watch the supplies section of my Etsy shop, you'll notice that I destash stuff several times a year. That's just the stuff that I think my customer base may be interested in. I donate even more than that every year to SCRAP, a Portland-based nonprofit that resells art supplies and uses the money in art education and other community projects. Not only does this help me make space for more art supplies (or, you know, things that aren't art supplies) but it also lets me revisit what I already have in hand. One of my biggest challenges when sorting is not getting distracted by "Ooooh, a shiny thing...let me just stop a minute and start making it into something." Usually the workbench ends up with a pile of projects-to-be by the time I'm done sorting and reorganizing.

Of course, this is just the art supplies. My personal animal skull collection, on the other hand, isn't so neatly contained. But that's another post someday...

Did you enjoy this post? Consider becoming my Patron on Patreon at http://www.patreon.com/lupagreenwolf for as little as $1/month!

#art supplies #art studio #organizing #artist #storage #mine

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cryptnus-blog · 6 years

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Ripple One, a program in Pickens County, helps get off government help

New Post has been published on https://cryptnus.com/2018/09/ripple-one-a-program-in-pickens-county-helps-get-off-government-help/

Ripple One, a program in Pickens County, helps get off government help

Seneca-based program moves into Easley’s Dream Center

Ripple of One logo(Photo: Ripple of One)

I tend to be a bit skeptical about programs that claim to help people “get off public assistance.”

That’s partly because it’s such a politically loaded issue. And partly because I believe most people running these programs have never been poor and have no idea what life is like for those who rely on government help.

But I have come to accept that the Dream Center of Pickens County is living up to its motto of giving people in need “a hand-up instead of a hand out,” and succeeding in helping folks move out of poverty.

Jim and Chris Wilson, the founders of the center, not only have been helping homeless people turn their lives around while living in one of the “tiny houses” outside the center. They’ve also turned the old school building that serves as their headquarters into a home for a variety of programs run by other groups that serve people in need.

A food pantry, a biblical counseling center, a teen outreach program, a soup kitchen and a free dental clinic are all housed in the former schoolhouse.

And the newest addition is a program called Ripple of One, which is expanding into Pickens County from its base in Seneca.

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At first, its mission sounded to me a lot like that of the Dream Center, which made me wonder how it would differ from what’s already there.

But after meeting with the leaders of Ripple, I understand that their focus is on families with children, whereas the Dream Center’s emphasis is on individuals in crisis. And Ripple has a system that rewards people — with real cash in some instances — for meeting monthly goals in health, education, career and budgeting.

Matching your savings

At the Dream Center, folks earn “Dream Dollars” for completing classes in subjects such as parenting. It’s funny money they can use at the center’s thrift stores.

In the Ripple program, a family’s savings will be matched, in cash, up to $235 a month. Families also can get $70 gift cards every time they reach certain financial goals.

There also are financial incentives for getting rid of things like rented TVs and furniture.

“We’ve seen now that it works,” said Stephanie Enders, founder of Ripple of One. “It actually is changing people’s lives.”

Emily ” Ray” Raymer, left, Randy Moore, and Stephanie Enders, right, outside the new office of Ripple of One, in the Dream Center of Pickens County. (Photo: Ron Barnett/staff)

Now, I’ll admit, I had some of that old squeamishness about this program at first. Stephanie is obviously a professional career person of cosmopolitan background. She told me that the part of her life she enjoyed most before moving to Seneca was the time she spent volunteering at a shelter for abused women in Chicago and a homeless shelter in Phoenix.

When she and her husband moved to the Upstate 17 years ago, she started looking for volunteer opportunities and ended up working with the state Department of Social Services in a six-week class the agency required for everyone who gets a “welfare check.”

“The first question I would ask them was what’s your plan to move beyond government assistance,” she said. “And every single time for about five years, I got the same answer: crickets. Not one person had a plan.”

I had to make sure that she understands that “welfare,” actually called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, is not an open-ended handout program. That was changed back during the Clinton administration. In South Carolina, most TANF recipients are limited to 12 months per 10-year period. The lifetime limit, set by the federal government, is five years.

Of course, she knew that. The Ripple program, Stephanie explained, focuses on getting people off food assistance (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) and subsidized housing, through the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

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The problem, she found out, is that people are “stuck” in the system. If they go back to school or get training and get a better paying job, they could lose disproportionately more from SNAP and HUD so as to more than offset any gain. So there’s really no incentive to try to do better, she said.

“It’s frustrating when people say, ‘oh, they need to go get a job and get off cigarettes or whatever,” Stephanie said. “It’s kind of one of those where if you go forward, you actually go backwards sometimes.”

So she started working to develop this program that became Ripple of One about seven years ago, just on her own, but under a nonprofit organization called the Family Friends Mentoring Project, run by DSS.

With the combination of life skills learned through the program, and the financial rewards for shoring up their money management, 48 adults and children have moved “beyond assistance” in the past 2 ½ years in Oconee County, she said.

Tara’s story

One of those success stories is that of Tara Williams. A single mother from Walhalla, she found herself strapped after she got laid off her factory job four or five years ago.

“I didn’t have a job and I had a small child I had to take care of,” she said.

Tara Williams and her son, Lucas, have a little fun with a selfie. (Photo: provided)

She heard about Ripple at church.

“It not only gave me financial freedom and showed me how to be financially literate, they also helped me with a lot of emotional issues that I was having which was causing the cycle,” she said.

She graduated from the program in April 2017 and now has a full-time office job in a medical practice.

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I was wondering how Ripple, which operates out of Seneca Presbyterian Church, is able to come up with all this matching money and rewards.

“The community has supported us extremely well to allow this to happen,” explained Randy Moore, chairman of the Ripple board.

In its Pickens County office, Ripple of One will be able to use some of the classes and programs the Dream Center offers with its people, and the person in charge of Ripple’s Pickens County operations, Emily “Ray” Raymer, will help out with some of the people who come to the Dream Center.

Ripple needs more volunteers to be mentors in Easley. (Call 325-0229 for info.)

I like the way Ray explains the meaning of the organization’s name: “We believe that one relationship, one encouraging word has the power to ripple forth.”

Yep. That’s how you change the world. Go forth and ripple, I say.

Contact Ron Barnett at [email protected].

Ron Barnett (Photo: Josh Morgan)

Read or Share this story: https://www.independentmail.com/story/opinion/columnists/2018/09/07/heres-how-program-easley-moves-people-off-government-assistance/1207759002/

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