PORTLAND, Ore. — June was a rough month for SCRAP PDX, with two broken windows in one week. But the store manager said as challenging as the vandalism was for the Portland nonprofit, the response from the community has been just as uplifting.
The store, located on Southwest Alder Street near Providence Park, promotes the reuse of arts and crafts supplies. It relies entirely on the community for material donations, which it then sells at a discount.
"Everything here is donated by our community," said Adrian Brown, site executive director for SCRAP PDX. "And it's all materials that can be reused and turned into something else. A second or third or fourth life. It's materials that are diverted from the waste stream so none of this is going into our landfills."
Last month, someone broke a window and entered the store at around 3 a.m. Brown said she got an alert from the security system and had to go down to the store and do an emergency board-up.
"Coming here for three hours at 3 a.m. is always rough," she said.
Then exactly one week later it happened again, this time in the middle of the day with plenty of people around.
"We had people in the building and someone just threw a rock through the window," Brown said. "A lot of people were here and saw it. And there was absolutely no reason for it that we can really discern."
The response from the community was immediate.
"Even that day, people were asking, 'what can we do to help you?'" Brown said.
SCRAP PDX shared the news about the broken windows on its Facebook page. Ever since, people have been stepping up to help, either shopping at the store or making material and financial donations.
"Our community has really come out great and support us," Brown said. "We've had a lot of people come in and shop with us that are new shoppers, which is great to being new people into our community. We've had a lot of people reach out online in response to our social media post that we made about it. It's just lovely to get such a great outpouring of love from our community."
Brown said the way the community has rallied around them seems fitting.
"That's what we do. We take something and we turn it into something better. And that's our mentality here, too, to take a bad situation and figure out how we can use that to actually bring our community closer together. And that's what this has done. So I will take a silver lining any day," she said.
HOW TO HELP: If you'd like to help SCRAP PDX, make a trip to the store or visit its website for information on how to make a material or financial donation.
