What I’m Doing Now

Updated March 30, 2025

I connect people with each other.

I work for pay selling reclaimed and surplus building materials as the store manager at ReUse Action in Buffalo. ReUse Action is a for-profit continuation of Buffalo ReUse, a not-for-profit we founded in 2006. We’ve recently regained control over the Buffalo ReUse not-for-profit.

I’m also responsible for communications, promotion and publicity and a fair portion of the technology. I direct our web presence and I manage and maintain The Guild @980, a business incubator we run in our building on Buffalo’s East Side.

My small biz craft initiatives are woodworking, bookbinding, website development and print production.

I’m a co-founder of The Foundry, a business incubator and makerspace, started up in 2012. I have a continuing interest in small business, startups, skilled trades, craft and small-scale manufacturing.

My community initiatives on the Web are the Preservation-Ready Sites website, which I started in 2013, and Brick Streets, a revival of an earlier list of Buffalo’s brick and stone streets. Lately, I’ve been helping Buffalo’s East Side Parkways Coalition by maintaining their website at www.EastSideParkwaysCoalition.com, as well as helping with mailing list and fund raising technology.

I’m on Mastodon Social as @kevinphayes and on BlueSky as kevinphayes.bsky.social. I write a blog post here from time to time. I like the ideas of IndieWeb, fundamentally “Control your own stuff”, but haven’t found the bandwidth to explore it more fully.