The Tool Library: How to Build and Maintain a Social and Environmental Justice Not-for-Profit Organization

Are you self-motivated, skilled, and resilient, but also other-directed and eager to learn? Are you independent-minded and yet concerned about social and environmental justice? Do you see yourself working or volunteering for worthy not-for-profit organizations in the future?

Motivated students from a wide array of disciplines can join the members and Board of the Tool Library at our shop, just a little below the UB South Campus at 2626 Main Street across from the Amherst Street metro station, in their efforts to build a sharing economy which will benefit the entire region.

The Tool Library—which celebrates its fifteenth anniversary this summer, has almost 5,000 tools and over 2,000  individual and group members. In addition to aiding personal do-it-yourself efforts, it organizes extensive community work: planting and maintaining trees, flowers, and neighborhood gardens; spearheading organized cleanups and streetscape and store-front maintenance; staging do-it-yourself and repair clinics; equipping and training in safety and lead abatement efforts.

Its largely young leadership includes recent UB graduates from Architecture, Urban Planning, Environmental Studies, English, Social Sciences, Law, Media Studies, Management, and Engineering, many of whom already have careers in other major local not-for-profits such as the Olmsted Parks Conservancy, the Buffalo History Museum, People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH), the Clean Air Coalition of Western New York, and The Central Terminal Restoration.

This opportunity will enable you, as is appropriate to your interests, goals and abilities, to learn this organization from the ground-up: staffing a shift or two weekly at the shop; learning its inventory, technology, budget and business model; participating in its various committees; helping with its website, social media, design of communication materials, and zine-style manuals; grant-writing efforts; working in the neighborhood “field”.

Your academic supervisors in these efforts will be Tool Library Board Members Dr. Cole Lowman and Dr. Barbara Bono. Dr. Lowman is an Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Department of Engineering Education, where they primarily teach STEM Communications, and Dr. Bono is Associate Professor Emerita of English and Global Gender and Sexuality Studies and former Academic Director of the UB Undergraduate Civic Engagement Academy. They will be assisted by former Board Member Hadar Borden, Program Director of UB’s Blackstone Launchpad, and member Caitlin Hoekstra, Assistant Director of Experiential Learning, College of Arts and Sciences.

Students will pursue a variety of outcomes, as is appropriate to individual interests and abilities:

• An improved shop inventory and procedures
• Website improvements and maintenance
• Improved and maintained social media communications
  
• Credited assistance with grant-writing and financial and budget maintenance
• Help with development of lead-abatement program
• Continued planning toward—including design of—new Tool Library spaces and building
  

• The Tool Library
  

non-profit, engineering education, english, social justice, environment, community service, volunteer