YSM’s Double Take Thrift Store is celebrating 25 years of life this year! Over these many years the store has seen thousands of community members walk through the doors, and thousands of pounds of clothing and other goods donated, saved from landfill to find new life and to help sustain and enrich lives in the community of Regent Park and beyond.
We live and breathe our motto–Reuse, Remake, Renew.
At Double Take we believe that the cycle of donating and thrifting is essential to living responsibly and sustainably as a society. We also believe that ‘upcycling’ has a special place in that cycle, bringing in imagination, creativity and growing strong communities to keep it going.
What’s Upcycling, and Why Is It Important To Double Take?
Double Take Thrift Store is on the leading edge of the Upcycling Community movement, and we’re excited to take a moment to share with you how it all started!
2020 brought many challenges with it, and like everyone else during the global pandemic, Double Take transformed and adapted.
During this time the new manager of Double Take, Sharon Abel, decided to springboard off of our well established system of donation sorting, selling, and recycling. She envisioned the addition of a donation sorting category for ‘Upcycling’, and began work behind-the-scenes on building the Studio as we know it today.
She assembled a team of staff, volunteers, artists-in-residence and co-op students, and in 2021 they were able to open the Double Take Upcycling Studio!
By definition, to upcycle means, ‘to recycle (something) in such a way that the resulting product is of a higher value than the original item: to create an object of greater value from (a discarded object of lesser value).’
What that definition doesn’t make clear is how the value is added to items. In our studio the value is added through care, attention, creativity and highly skilled work, often done by people who are donating their valuable time.
The team, which is always growing and changing, remains committed to adding value to holey jeans, ripped knitted sweaters, clothing with moth holes and more.
Some of these items can be mended, but some become material for new creations. Staff and volunteers continue to put aside donated items which cannot not be sold as-is, but with a little time in the Upcycling Studio can become beloved and unique pieces headed for the curated closets of the thrifting community.
Not only is that amazing news for those of us who want to practice sustainable consumption, but it’s also awesome to be given a way to throw support behind YSM’s work of ending chronic poverty in Toronto.
How Does Upcycling Help YSM?
As a social enterprise of the Yonge Street Mission, Double Take Thrift Store financially supports YSM’s many community programs. Our profits feed, clothe and help to sustain individuals and families.
We ourselves also serve the community every day at Double Take, by providing access to affordable goods through a dignified shopping experience, engaging in community-building initiatives like our Upcycling Studio, and finally, by encouraging people to get involved through donating their time and skill as volunteers, or donating their gently-used, clean items.
We want to activate community members in the things they are passionate about in order to gain momentum in our shared mission of chronic poverty prevention and sustainable consumption. These goals are more connected than we know!
We are so grateful to partner with volunteers and donors in the work of reusing, remaking and renewing and we hope to continue in it for many years to come.
Imagine the Upcycling Studio in another 25 years! It’s so exciting to think of what can happen if we just keep making space.
What Does a Day in The Studio Actually LOOK Like?
Since this exciting space opened in our thrift store, it has incubated and produced so much life and creativity that it’s hard to keep up! In addition to studio volunteers and staff continually mending and creating items to sell in the thrift store, the studio houses many more functions.
Over the years, we have hosted art, sewing and mending workshops run by community members and artists-in-residence. This is something we continue to do today, driven by community interest and expertise.
We have regular Studio Sales for the community to come and raid our delicious and at times overflowing supply of donated sewing, embroidery and crafting supplies.
We’ve developed volunteer teams who teach newcomers how to mend, and we continue to provide access to mending education in different ways.
We’ve put together video tutorials and Do-It-Yourself kits so community members can learn new skills on their own if they can’t partake in in-person learning.
We also gear up annually for our own Double Take Community Resale Market and Garage Sale, as well as joining in other markets in surrounding areas of Toronto whenever possible throughout the year.
Because the studio is largely community and volunteer driven we see the possibilities as boundless. It is difficult to concretely define what we do on an ongoing basis because we are always growing and changing.
In December of 2023, Clair Webb came in as our Upcycling Studio Community Coordinator. She encourages, invigorates and inspires any and all community members to join the movement of upcycling and find unique ways to get involved at Double Take.
People often approach Clair with ideas, and she is always excited to try to find ways to run with them and see how far they’ll go. The studio exists, in part, to be a stepping stone for someone who wants to get an idea off the ground!
We want to always be open to new ideas while at the same time remain a sustainable and consistent structure within which our developing community can grow and thrive.
Above all, we want to make upcycling and sustainability as easy and accessible as possible so that the movement grows and makes lasting change in the world.
Thank you for taking the time to read our story! We hope that it encourages you to get involved, or to tell the story of what we do here to someone you know.
If you would like to get involved as a volunteer in the Double Take Upcycling Studio, there is no better time than now. Check out our volunteer opportunities here, or get in touch with Clair in the studio at studio@doubletake.ysm.ca
If you have items that you’d like to donate to Double Take Thrift Store and questions about how to do so, click here.
For information about what’s happening in the Studio right now, visit our Upcycling Studio page here, and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, or Tiktok to stay current!
