Faithful readers of our blog may recognize the name of interior designer Carolyn Rebuffel Flannery. We have loved working with Carolyn to help realize her beautiful, pattern-driven design projects and have featured her twice in previous articles, once for her inventive self-created textiles and again when we wanted our designer colleagues to weigh in on their favorite shades of white paint.
While many of us have pivoted in different ways in 2020, Carolyn took a big leap. Closing her design business for one year, Carolyn dedicated herself to launching and running a charitable nonprofit, Make It Home. Combining her longtime advocacy for foster children with her knowledge of and networks in the design community, Carolyn’s new non-profit places donated new and gently-used furniture and fixtures (a longtime waste issue in the design industry) in homes of newly-adopted foster children and of previously homeless adults transitioning out of crisis and into permanent residences.
Thus, Make It Home provides quality furniture, including beds, lamps, tables, and dining sets to vulnerable populations who might otherwise not have access to these things that create home. With COVID-19 causing the need for support to surge, Carolyn decided to have Make It Home be her main priority.
And now, what started out as a one-year sabbatical has turned into a full-time career change. Carolyn reports, “I am not going back to residential interior design—this endeavor is too much fun and has the potential to help so many people. So I am going to do it full-time for the foreseeable future.”
“I might take on a design project here or there,” she adds, “if it looks as fun as what I am doing now, but...”
Click here to read more about Make It Home, as covered in Business of Home.
At Arana Craftsman Painters we care deeply about supporting community. We wanted to spotlight Carolyn for her courageous leap into full-time philanthropic work and are honored to count her among our creative, change-making colleagues, clients, and friends.
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