Regina Carter

Furniture is an expensive commodity that is often overlooked in favor of more essential items like food or medicine, but Regina deeply believes that your home is a reflection of your mental health, and that everyone deserves a space that feels like one. Every day across the city, perfectly usable furniture gets pushed out of office buildings, cleared from dorm rooms, and left on sidewalks, while families in NYC struggle to furnish their homes or make do with pieces decades past their prime. As a NYCHA resident and former NYCHA family services employee, Regina saw the gap firsthand and decided she’d be the person to help close it. 

So she built Repurposed Life, a volunteer-led nonprofit that rescues furniture headed for landfills and redistributes it to NYC residents through monthly free pop-ups across the five boroughs. Through her organization and growing network of volunteers, Regina has redistributed nearly half a million pounds of reused materials since launching. Known in her community as ‘the Furniture Queen,’ Regina has become the connection between the city’s waste and its needs, one pop-up at a time.