Our Mission

Make Your Mark is a Wenatchee-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit that sponsors arts access for people facing financial and other barriers, including neurodivergent individuals, youth, and adults with disabilities. We fund participation in hands-on creative education so that cost or circumstance never determines who gets to make things.

Make Your Mark and Artisan's Mill

Make Your Mark and Artisan's Mill work side by side in the same building. Artisan's Mill is the makerspace itself, a 14,000 square foot destination space opening in Spring 2027. Make Your Mark owns the studio equipment and sponsors access to it for people who couldn't otherwise afford to be there. What Artisan's Mill pays to use that equipment comes back to fund sponsored access, so every person who joins helps open the door for someone else. They're two separate organizations working toward the same thing: making sure cost or circumstance never decides who gets to make things.

Who We Serve

Make Your Mark provides hands-on arts education and creative community to people who would otherwise be left out, the ones who are too much, too loud, too in their heads, or too far outside the box. We believe different isn't something to fix, it's something to build with. We put supplies, equipment, instruction, and access into the hands of neurodivergent individuals of all ages, people with limited financial means, youth ages 12 to 21, adults facing financial or other barriers, people with disabilities, people in work release programs, and anyone still searching for where they belong. Our goal is simple: help people find their thing and give them what they need to pursue it, because when someone who's struggled their whole life to fit in discovers what their hands can do, everything changes.

Lighting a fire
for the love of creating

Ceramics · Textiles · Glass · and more

What We Offer

Divisions opening Spring 2027:
Painting. Open studio, all media.
Ceramics. Wheel throwing, hand-building, glazing, slab building.
Textiles. Knit and crochet, weaving, spinning, sewing, leatherwork, dyeing.
Large scale glass fusing. Guest instruction from glass artist Kerry Johnson of Lynnwood.
Letterpress and Printmaking. Home to a pre-1914 Chandler & Price platen press.
Technology Arts and Sculpture round out the maker floor.Woodworking and Metalworking and casting will follow in a later phase, once the additional shop building goes up on the parking lot.Current and upcoming program formats: raku nights, slip casting workshops, textiles workshops, open studio sessions, photography workshops, tie-dye workshops, paint-your-own-bisque nights, open mic poetry nights. Full studio instruction across all divisions is coming soon.No individually rented studio areas. Fully communal. This is a shared-access model, not a rental hall.

Our Story

Make Your Mark was founded in February 2026 and received 501(c)(3) approval in June 2026. On September 26 we finally got to show Wenatchee what we've been building, at our Launch Party right here in the Old Stone Warehouse.
Artisan's Mill opens in this building in Spring 2027. Make Your Mark will be here to make sure the door stays open to people who couldn't otherwise walk through it.
Though we're in our founding year, our roots here run deep. Our founders have lived and worked in Wenatchee for years, and the relationships, equipment, and partnerships powering our programming were built long before our nonprofit status was official. We are makers ourselves.

Our Board

Todd Mill, Co-Founder and President

Coast Guard veteran, thirty-five years as an executive chef, three culinary gold medals, and a career spent building kitchens and leading teams. He's also a woodworker and fine-art furniture maker, and he personally led the restoration of this 1906 building, hands in it start to finish, because that's the only way he does anything. Now he designs glaze recipes the way he designed food recipes, not as a problem to solve but a result to chase. He will tell you he is not an artist. He is wrong.

"There is nothing wrong with you. There is something extraordinary in you. Here is a chisel. Show us."

Alicia Maye Clifford, Co-Founder, Treasurer, and Artistic Director

Ceramics, paint, ink, photography, tattoo, graphite, and more. Not because she can't choose, but because she doesn't speak in mediums, she speaks in feeling. Her photography has been published and has flown her across the world. She's ADHD and survived multiple simultaneous strokes and the open heart surgery that followed, and she came back to the work after all of it. Once, over two and a half years and against her will, her art was taken from her entirely. It took her eighteen years to fight her way back to it. Now she's made herself the reason nobody else loses theirs.

"Making things isn't optional for human wellbeing. It's essential. Like breathing."

Morgana Barnett, Co-Founder, Secretary, and Textiles Director

Sketched her first party dress at six, on the floor while her grandmother sewed on an old Pfaff. Since then: jeans, tailoring, crochet, knitting, weaving, spinning her own fiber. Ceramics came in high school, where she fell for making permanent artifacts that will outlive her. Now she merges both, curating a whole outfit from bone-shaped porcelain hair pins down to the custom buttons on a pair of jeans. Autistic, ADHD, LGBTQ+, and the person who finds whoever feels like an outsider and makes sure they don't stay one.

"No matter how simple or whimsical your style is, you can make it yourself with your own two hands, the slow and intentional way."

Josh Wellman, Co-Founder and Director of Development and Infrastructure

Found clay in a middle school classroom in Ohio and thought: wait, I can make anything? Decades later he still feels the same way. He works wheel-thrown stoneware and raku, which he loves because the fire gets a vote. He's a teacher at heart, more interested in what you make than in what he makes. He also owns Artisan's Hill, the property we hope will one day grow fiber and raw materials for the work happening here.

"What I hope people think when they see my work is, 'If he can do it, why can't I?'"

You don't need permission to make something.

Our Crew

Amber McKown, Director of Operations, AKA "The Czar"

Not only does she come from a heritage of talented professional artists, she ran front of house at Rail Station, which means she already knows how to make a room full of strangers feel looked after. At opening she'll run participant intake, outreach, and program logistics.

"Sir, I am a professional!"

Lane Frazier, Specialty Divisions

Metalworking, leatherworking, and safety, plus the sustainability vision for the whole building: reclaiming material, closing loops, and making sure a place built on making things doesn't become a place built on wasting them.

"Challenge 'can't.' Do not accept limitations set by others before starting. Some of the greatest works of history happened simply because those who aspired didn't limit themselves with an apostrophe and a lower case t."

Special Recognition:
Eric Haggin, Volunteer

He's put more hours into this than many of us, across facility operations, learning glaze chemistry, and production. He's currently enrolled to study 3D modeling and CAD at Wenatchee Valley College, with the goal of joining Artisan's Mill as an instructor. We would not be this far along without him.

Some buildings hold history... Some never stop making it.

➼ 2,000+ volunteer hours logged across our board and volunteers since May
➼ 15+ grant applications submitted since June
➼ Approved for Google for Nonprofits, Canva for Nonprofits, TechSoup, and Goodstack
➼ Sponsored by Pins & Needles and Mission Yarn
➼ 6 community allies, including the Alpine Meadows Spinners and Weavers Guild, whose entire lending library is moving in
➼ Hosted our first public fundraiser, the Launch Party, on September 26, 2026
➼ 9 working kilns and on track for 11, plus a vitreograph kiln being built and a large Laguna gas kiln waiting on the remodel
➼ Donated kilns from glass artist Kerry Johnson and the de Graaff estate collection, plus a pre-1914 letterpress
➼ $6,000 to $8,000 in donated equipment from a retired CWU ceramics professor
➼ 100+ glaze recipes developed and tested in-house, with thirty buckets production-ready
➼ 300+ bisqued pieces prepared for classes, paint-your-own sessions, and booth sales
➼ 100+ slip cast molds, with more being designed in-house
➼ Live art demos at every First Friday since May
➼ 6+ small-group raku firings and hands-on lessons hosted
➼ 501(c)(3) approved June 2026, founded February 2026

Where We Work

Make Your Mark is based at 29 N. Columbia St., Wenatchee, WA 98801, inside the Old Stone Warehouse, a 14,000 square foot building on the National Historic Registry.Built by John Lillis in 1906, it was the first stone warehouse of its kind in Wenatchee, with walls of local sandstone quarried right here in the valley, 32 inches thick above ground and 42 inches below. Through the 1920s to the 1950s it worked as hard as it looked: home to Wenatchee Fruit and Storage, a Sears Roebuck warehouse, Eckert Trucking, and Wells Coulee Lumber and Box Co., with a stretch as a cannery in there too. The city took it over in 1976 and sold it in 1980, and it's worn plenty of hats since, from Beavers honky tonk and saloon, whose name still stretches across our red roof, to J.P. Beans, Spaghetti Works, Goochi's, Jackson's Steaks, Emerald Station, and lastly Rail Station and Ale House.When Todd restored it, he peeled back layer after layer of old flooring, tile, carpet, linoleum laid over carpet, and carpet laid over that, to find the original clear fir underneath. Then he sealed the seams with rope the way boat builders do. Now it's ours to reinvent again.

Thank You, Rail Station

For 21 years, Todd poured everything he had into Rail Station, including feeding hundreds of Wenatchee Valley kids for free when COVID shut restaurants down in 2020, about 300 meals a week, no questions asked. So many Thanksgivings, he made sure the employees went home with a full kit to host their own holiday, not just a shift meal.
Rail Station is closing its doors October 4, and it's going to leave a real hole in this valley. But everything that made it what it was, the generosity, the community, the belief that people matter more than the bottom line, is what's carrying forward into this next chapter. Thank you, Wenatchee, for loving Rail Station as much as we did, and thank you to our staff, past and present, for all you've given to this space.

Where We're At

Make Your Mark was founded in February 2026 and received 501(c)(3) approval in June. What's happened since has mostly been hands and hours: more than 2,000 volunteer hours logged since May across our board and volunteers, and that number runs low, since several of us are still catching up on our logs.Much of that time has gone into building the studio itself. We have nine working kilns, with two more coming online soon: electric kilns for bisque and higher-fire work, two raku kilns, and two large clamshell kilns for large-scale glass, one donated by Lynnwood glass artist Kerry Johnson and one that came to us through the de Graaff estate collection. Co-founder Todd Mill is building a vitreograph kiln from parts, and a large Laguna gas kiln goes in during the remodel where the pizza oven sits now. Alongside those: two slab rollers, two 3D printers, a Cricut Maker 3, a spray booth with ventilation built specifically for ceramics work, storage shelving built by co-founder Josh, and over 100 slip cast molds with more being designed in-house. A retired ceramics professor from CWU donated between $6,000 and $8,000 in equipment to help get us here.Our letterpress division is anchored by a pre-1914 Chandler & Price platen press and a Challenge Advance paper cutter, from the estate of Jan de Graaff, the renowned horticulturist of Oregon Bulb Farms whose lily hybrids turned a famously difficult flower into one people could grow in their own backyards.Todd has developed and tested more than 100 glaze recipes, most of them his own formulations, and has been narrowing them down to the working palette the studio will offer. Thirty large buckets are already mixed and ready for both production and classes, with more than 300 bisqued pieces prepared for paint-your-own sessions, glazing classes, and booth sales that raise funds for sponsored access. He's also been testing a custom porcelain and stoneware clay body built specifically for this studio, recently completed John Britt's glaze workshop in Seattle, and has been designing slip cast molds from scratch by 3D modeling a form, printing a master, and pouring plaster into it. Alicia Maye Clifford has a full line of colored porcelain recipes ready to roll out once that clay body is finalized.We haven't been waiting for the doors to open to start making and teaching. We've brought live art demonstrations to First Friday art walks every month since May: wheel throwing, live painting, live fiber spinning from co-founder Morgana on both a spinning wheel and a drop spindle, and mini wheel throwing from our youngest demonstrator, who is 16. Behind the scenes we've been running informal instruction wherever we can, including one-on-one wheel throwing lessons and kiln loading taught by co-founder Josh, drop spindle spinning, slip casting and greenware care, plaster mold building, tie-dye sessions with small groups of teenagers, and at least six small raku firings. We've also put serious hours into learning the equipment we intend to hand off to other people: kiln electronics and mechanics, 3D modeling and printing, and Cricut design software, which has gone into branded shirts, tiny 3D printed frames for hand-painted miniatures, and painted magnets for our booths.On the funding side, we've submitted more than 15 grant applications since June and been approved for Google for Nonprofits, Canva for Nonprofits, TechSoup, and Goodstack. Our founding-year goals are to open with at least five active programming divisions, enroll our first cohort of sponsored participants, and secure $50,000 in grant funding for equipment and sponsored access. Longer term, we're working toward serving more than 100 sponsored participants a year by Year 3.None of this is a finished makerspace yet. It's kilns getting repaired, glaze recipes getting narrowed down, molds getting poured, and people teaching each other wherever we can until there's a studio to do it in. We're building the place we wish had existed back when we were the ones who needed it.

Building Community, Not Competing

There are already organizations across North Central Washington doing beautiful work in pieces of what we offer, and we're so glad they're here. We'd rather build a collaborative community with them than compete.In the ValleyAlpine Meadows Spinners and Weavers Guild. Their entire lending library, spinning wheels, and loom collection are moving in with us once humidity control for their wooden equipment is in place, and our members will have access to them. Morgana is their incoming librarian.Two Rivers Medieval Faire. Since 2008, they've been giving this valley an affordable way to learn and enjoy history. Their garb meetups are coming to our downstairs space.Pins & Needles. Wenatchee's alterations specialists, and one of our sponsors. Bridal, formal, tailoring, repair. They'll be teaching classes through our facility.Mission Yarn. Sponsoring our yarn library wall.From Beyond Our ValleyKerry Johnson Glass, Lynnwood. Fifty years of architectural cast and fused glass, with work in museums and buildings around the world. He's coming over the pass to teach large-scale glass fusing intensives.Dreaming Robots, Massachusetts. Maurice Ribble builds the Electric Eel Wheel, an open-source electric spinning wheel that put spinning in reach of people who can't use a treadle and people who can't afford a traditional wheel. Same idea as ours, different tool.What's ComingMore conversations than fit on one page, including big artist gatherings with RadarStation, and early friendships with arts organizations, an autism-focused nonprofit, a community college art department, and other groups around the valley. If you run something in this valley that overlaps with what we're building, we'd love to hear from you. We'd rather know you and build with you than work around you.

The valley is better with more of us in it.

• Contact Us.

We're not able to do this alone

Some things we still need

➼ Pottery wheels. We have a few and need several more. Every wheel we add is another person throwing at the same time instead of waiting a turn.➼ A wall-mounted extruder. It makes handles, tiles, and coil work possible for people who can't center clay, which puts ceramics within reach for a lot more hands.➼ Kiln shelves, posts, and stilts. Deeply unglamorous, and the thing that decides how much we can actually fire in a week.➼ Studio easels. We have two. Painting classes need eight to ten.➼ Desktop computers. Our technology arts division needs machines that can run 3D modeling and design software. If your business cycles out equipment, this is an easy way for that hardware to get a second life.➼ Air filtration for the ceramics area. Clay and glaze dust is a genuine health issue, and good filtration is what lets us run open studio safely for people of every age.➼ A de-airing pugmill. It recycles clay scraps back into usable clay, which keeps material costs down for everyone working here, and for sponsored participants most of all.➼ Programmable kiln controllers, or a large kiln that already has them capable of reaching cone 8 or 10. Being able to program a firing with holds is what makes results consistent and repeatable.➼ Materials of almost any kind. Clay, glazes, yarn, fabric, paint, canvas, paper, printmaking supplies. Consumables disappear fast once programming starts.Make Your Mark owns the equipment donated to us, and that ownership is what lets us put it into the hands of people who couldn't otherwise afford access. In-kind donations may be tax deductible, and we're glad to provide an acknowledgment letter for your records.

Help Us Build This

Volunteer

Volunteers help us get there, whether that's hands-on building and setup, teaching a skill, helping with events, or just showing up to pitch in. Every hour you give goes toward helping someone discover what they love and find their place as a creating, contributing member of this community.Sign up at Track It Forward:

• Volunteer

Give

Every dollar goes toward sponsoring someone's access to the tools, materials, and lessons they couldn't otherwise afford, and any gift before our doors open earns your name a spot on our Founding Donors Wall. Want to sponsor a maker or talk about a bigger gift? Email us at [email protected].Make Your Mark is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, EIN 42-2754476. Donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law.

• Give

Donate Equipment or materials

Some of the best things in this building got here because someone had a kiln, a loom, or a box of clay they weren't using anymore. If you have tools, equipment, or materials looking for a second life, we'd love to hear from you.Email:

• Donate Equipment