An artist’s passion for reuse gives old dolls a new lease on life – and spreads the DIY gospel to kids.

“Give us your tired, your torn, your worn-out toys, and a child can turn them into original works of art,” says Cincinnati, Ohio-based sculptor and educator Tommy Rueff. At Rueff’s innovative nonprofit, Toy Lab, children and adults team up to create imaginative new playthings from scrap parts.

Since Rueff started Toy Lab in 2002 with his former business partner Sean Mullaney, he has helped breathe new life into approximately 24,000 used toy parts, all collected through the group’s rescue-and-recycle program. Toy Lab – which operates under Happen, Inc., an umbrella arts organization–accepts donations in large volume: Each year, it saves more than 1,200 pounds of plastic from heading to the landfill. Once donations are made (by individuals and institutions), toys are washed, sanitized, separated into parts (arms, legs, heads, etc.) and then sent to the Hunks o’ Junk bin in the laboratory. There, they await reincarnation at the hands of young visitors, who with the help of glue guns and hardware–and Toy Lab volunteers–form artful pieces by conjoining, say, Transformers legs and Hot Wheels tires.

When the concept behind Toy Lab was first proposed to Rueff, he was a partner in a successful marketing firm. “My work was cool, but it wasn’t really changing lives,” he says. The notion of teaching kids in a creative environment piqued his interest. By applying a business model to the nonprofit arts world, he and Mullaney drafted an outreach plan, and soon Toy Lab took flight. Today, Rueff says, the enterprise is thriving. And he gets the satisfaction of knowing that he’s changing lives, one toy at a time.