Submitted by James Carlson on Mon, 07/06/2009 - 11:05am.
As many know, on June 19th our facility was again heavily damaged by flooding through our roof. The Quasi-Cafe was completely destroyed, and portions of the Flowspace where our community groups meet and gather was heavily damaged. This occurred exactly one year and one week later than our 2008 flood, and for the same reasons. Our lease arrangement gives Bucketworks complete responsibility for every part of the building except the roof and unfortunately, the building reached its end of life while we were in it. Despite efforts by our landlord to fix, patch, and repair the problem, the roof simply cannot be fixed--it has to be replaced, and the economic impact of this disaster on Bucketworks prevents us from footing that bill.
Our community rallied around us the last time we flooded and many volunteers helped us re-hang drywall and recarpet and decorate Bucketworks. We cannot ask you to do that again, when we are certain that this will happen again and again in this building. So we have decided to temporarily close Bucketworks for the month of July while we search for a new home.
We've been through a lot--asbestos remediation, three floods--of the last 24 months in this location, we've been closed for a combined total of 11 months. Yet we managed to host 617 events, 4 camps, 52 businesses, over 100 meetings and activities of businesses, hosted 10 plays, 4 art shows, and captured more than 300,000 photos and dozens videos of the many artists and entrepreneurs growing and energizing the cultural economy of Milwaukee.
This just tells us that we are onto something, and that it's worth doing, and that our community benefits from the new connections and ideas that emerge from being in a room together, regardless of how wet it might be on the floor.
To that end we are refocusing our facility and its programming around two key areas: co-working and meetups. Our intention is to make Bucketworks the best place for innovators, inventors, free agents to work, and to make it the best place for community organizations like Web414, Spreenkler, Rotaract, the Creative Coalition, MARN, the MNSC and others to meet and host their wider community in dialogue -- and for new community organizations and social enterprises to make their start.
We will focus less on enabling technical arts such as theatre and light-industrial manufacturing activities. Theatre shows--unless on a small scale--will not happen at Bucketworks, but rehearsals can and will. We will encourage our theatre members to do their performances at other local theatres like the Miramar and Alchemist in Bayview. We'll try to forge partnerships with Red Line and the Hide House to host some of the talented artists like Nathan Gartz so he can continue his research in crystal growth in pottery glazes.
On July 17 and 18, we will need your help to sell off and provision the many thousands of materials, tools, equipment and goods that are stored in our facility into other parts of the community--hopefully we can store some of it, and retrieve it later when we are ready to open in a new facility.
We have looked at several new places and are still researching our options. Our hope is to find a landlord who will allow us to scale our expenses as we re-grow the community that has been impacted by this disaster, and one that will give us pricing that lets us keep our membership rates low for the entrepreneurs and groups that need a place to work and a place to meet.
Stick with us: volunteer to help us move, sell our goods, or find a new place. We've several good places in mind. Take a look at our space requirements guide for more details on what we need.
We want your input, too--how can we make Bucketworks better? Send us a DM on twitter @bucketworks, email grow@bucketworks.org, or call me directly at 414-405-2701.
Thank you!
