Keeping Ketchikan Creative

Spark & Salvage is a creative reuse center and maker space tucked into Plaza Port West — part hands-on art studio, part educational lab, part rescue mission for materials Ketchikan no longer needs.

We started here because Ketchikan needed us to. After local school closures and teacher layoffs left a gap in hands-on, screen-free learning for kids in our rainy corner of Southeast Alaska, we decided to fill it — with color, with tools, with two tons (and counting) of salvaged classroom and industrial materials given a second life.

The Salmonberry Spirit

Our name for this is the Salmonberry Spirit, and it's more than a metaphor — it's how we think about resilience. The native salmonberry bush can be cut all the way back to the ground and still return, vibrant and ready to sprout, because its roots run too deep to destroy. That's Ketchikan. That's this community. And that's what we're building here: something rooted deeply enough to weather setbacks and bloom again anyway.

What You'll Find Here

Spark & Salvage blends the structured, hands-on learning of a design lab with the wild, resourceful energy of a scrap-heap workshop. Under one roof:

• Paid educational tracks 

• A material reuse shop

• Open Tinker Studio time

• Community events

Why "Salvage"

Because almost everything here started as something else. A stack of old blueprints. A bin of mismatched buttons. A pallet of surplus classroom supplies that would otherwise have gone to the landfill. We take what Ketchikan doesn't need anymore and put it back into the hands of people who'll turn it into something new — a costume, a cardboard castle, an hour of a kid's undivided, un-screened attention.

That's the whole idea. Come build something with us.