Our Mission


Sister Trillium is a volunteer-based Creative Reuse Store, learning exchange and co-working space in Yellow Springs, Ohio. We support accessible, sustainable, and collaborative art-making by:

+ offering a Pay-What-You-Can scale for supplies so that art-making is available to all 

+ providing a hub to donate unwanted + partially-used creative materials towards reuse

+ partnering with local programs and hosting artists for workshops + events

+ facilitating inclusive space for skill-sharing and connectivity

Courtesy of SCRAP Portland:

Creative Reuse Centers have become popular around the country as a way to reduce waste and bring new creative life to discarded and/or partially used arts and crafts materials as well as a hub for learning and community building. Also known as upcycling or repurposing, manufactured and natural materials have the potential to be transformed for further enjoyment, education, and reuse. The documented benefits of creative reuse include the following:

  • Educators can stretch their budgets by purchasing affordable and unique materials

  • Kids can learn about reuse in a fun, playful and diverse environment

  • The local creative community will have access to inexpensive, quality materials

  • Thousands of pounds of useable materials will be diverted from the landfill

  • Households, manufacturers and businesses will have a hub to donate unwanted materials (that otherwise get dumped)

  • Centers can create green collar jobs and volunteer opportunities—and support grassroots economic development

What is Creative Reuse?

Sister acknowledges the essentiality of community + familiarity and embodies our organization as one that is femme/female co-created.

Trillium is Ohio's State Wildflower, blooming in late spring to early summer (like us, established in April 2023!). The flower is three-petaled, resembling the three-arrowed recycle symbol. As a myrmecochorous plant, the trillium takes part in the "circular dance" of seed dispersal by ants, much like how we work to propagate creativity and learning exchange in our community.

Founders + Board of Operations

  • Zoey Bryant

    Co-Founder + Former Director of Operations

    Zoey (she/they) is a community-taught artist, entrepreneur, and lifelong dabbler. They come from a lineage of crafters and devout thrifters, so the concept of a creative reuse space felt like a progressive take on the already fond and familiar. Previously, Zoey has volunteered on various small non-profit teams ranging from folk dance committees, farming, and art-centered social justice projects. Since 2019 she has also been the business owner of her bodywork practice, Imbolc Healing Therapies.

    Creative inspiration: European folk traditions, movement, dogs, mountains, puppets

    Mediums: sumi painting, ink illustration, sewing, printmaking, gift wrapping

  • Allison Paul, PhD

    Co-Founder + Former Programming Advisor

    Allison (she/her) is an artist and art educator. She has taught in a variety of settings including K-12 public and independent schools, colleges and universities, museums, community centers, nonprofits and gardens. Her research and teaching interests include community-based and collaborative artmaking, socially-engaged art, participatory action research, place-based education, and peace education.

    Creative inspiration: memory + shared stories, socially engaged art, mosaics, maps, quilts, waterways + the shore, art in everyday life

    Mediums: pottery, mixed media collage, paper folding, making jam and food in jars

  • Marie Hertzler, PhD

    Co-Founder + Interim Director of Operations

    Marie (she/her) is an educator and an advocate of creative endeavors. She taught French at the university level. Currently she is an organizer of collaborative community art projects and a participant in art, music, theater, aerial dance and yoga in the Village. She is a former board member of Chamber Music Yellow Springs and a current board member of the Yellow Springs Arts Council.

    Creative inspiration: Brian M, garden tools + my garden, Catherine Z, viewing art at museums, galleries + studios, a beautiful plate of healthy food

    Mediums: yoga, aerial dance, interior + exterior space design, art book circle, ukulele

  • Laura Lucas-M.A., LSW

    Miller Encore Fellow + Shop Manager

    Laura (she, her) is a recent transplant to the Yellow Springs area. She has worked in housing, economic development, and arts administration. She has also spent time as a librarian, and as an owner/operator of two antiques/arts shops.

    Creative inspiration: grace, antiquity, metamorphosis, spirit, kin

    Mediums: whatever wonders present themselves

  • Holly Weir

    Donations Coordinator

    Holly (she/her) is a community member and artist committed to sustainability and reuse. From limited or pre-determined materials (ie scraps), Holly creates compositions which mostly resemble collage, be it with paper ephemera, fabric cuttings, or broken plate mosaic. Holly has been living in the US for 11 years using the opportunity for self-actualization and diving deeper into what it means to “belong” in a culture and in a language.

    Creative inspiration: salvaged materials, intimate relationships, cultural dissonance, brasilidade, serving others

    Mediums: fiber art (weaving, sewing, mending), linoleum/mono printmaking, multimedia collage, mosaic, sculpture, photography

  • Amanda Hernandez

    Financial Director

    Amanda’s (she/they) professional experience with nonprofits began in 2021 when they moved to Yellow Springs to work for Agraria. She was the farmer there and realized how the food system, specifically the soil our food is grown in, was generally left out of sustainability discussions. Soil sequestering carbon and keeping that soil healthy should be a much bigger discussion than it currently is. Farming also taught her to work with nature and be creative—creative in the methods they used to build soil health and with my companion planting!

    Creative inspiration: music, street art, and their feelings

    Mediums: writing poetry, dancing bomba plena (a traditional Puerto Rican dance influenced by their African ancestors), and playing bass guitar

  • Lynn Sontag, M. ED

    Grant Writer + Program Coordinator

    Lynn (she/her) is a former public school special ed teacher for preschool children. Before that she had her own nursery school at her home and also worked at the YS Children's Center. All of those jobs allowed her to be creative - with story telling, art making, book making, doll making and community building within her classroom. She has gardened since childhood and worked on numerous farms and ranches both here and out west. She grew up in south Florida and that has inspired the overgrown, slightly untidy and tropical look of her gardens. She is a former member of the Antioch School Board,  YS Children's Center Board, Community Solutions Board (now Agraria), and the Ohio Ecological Food and Farming Association Board.


    Creative inspiration: her grandfather Andre, the ocean, sailing, her mother, flowers and trees, vivid colors, favorite stories and books


    Mediums: doll making, drawing, gardening, creating happy groups of children, painting and cooking

  • Rachel Hall

    Social Media Manager

    Rachel Hall (she/her) is a Yellow Springs-based artist and photographer. She received her AFA from Sinclair Community College in Dayton, OH + her BFA from Ohio University in Athens, OH. She’s a frequent inhabitant of Glen Helen; you will often find her painting or sketching there. Rachel is heavily inspired by nature and volunteers at Sister Trillium to help maintain environmental sustainability + grow the thriving art community here in the Springs.

    Creative inspiration: Beethoven, the golden ratio, fish, Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime, nature in all its facets

    Mediums: Oil paint, watercolor, ink, photography, singing

Advisory Team

  • Migiwa Orimo (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist. Her work has been shown extensively, including Apexart (NYC), National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington DC), and many universities and art centers/galleries in the US. As a social Justice activist, Orimo also facilitates People’s Banner Workshop and provides free banners to activist groups.

  • Selena [Len] Loomis (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist, land-tender, and educator living and working in Shawnee and Osage land, so-called southeast Ohio. Working in social sculpture, textile craft, and DIY publishing, Selena is committed to intentional community-building and arts projects that bring people together. As a queer disabled person, they make work about (dis)comfort, cycles, and the time the body keeps. Selena has a BA in Performance Art from Antioch College and is a current MFA Candidate in Sculpture + Expanded Practices at Ohio University.

  • Dr. Debbie Henderson (she/her) has spent her life in the Arts: Theatre scenery, costume & stage property design; Residential & Restaurant design; Faux Decorative wall painting; and a Museum Exhibit and books concerning the history, manufacture, and wearing of Men’s Hats.

  • See above, Co-founder

  • Forest Bright (he/they) MFA, Assistant Professor of Visual Arts, makes images that develop into larger social projects. His work has been exhibited at Cothenius Gallery in Berlin, the Beijing American Center, The Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor, The Dayton Society of Artists, and The Emporium in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Recently his drawing, collaboratively produced with a group of women serving life sentences at Dayton Correctional Institution, has been included as part of nationally traveling exhibition States of Incarceration organized by The New School of Social Research. Forest also works as an illustrator and designer, designing the cover for Flight, a book of flash fiction written by Robin Littell and published by Paper Nautilus, and is currently working on a book with anthropologist Emily Steinmetz, that is an extension of a cover article published in Anthropology News in 2019.