JOHN WACKMAN founded the first Repair Cafe in New York State and now describes his role as that of coordinator, communicator, and cheerleader for Repair Cafes in the Hudson Valley, Catskills, and Capital District of New York, as well as for the repair movement globally. He has participated in Repair Cafes in the Netherlands and co-presented with Martine Postma at the Drawdown Learn Conference at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. He has presented on community repair at the New York and New Jersey Library Associations’ annual conferences and led a statewide webinar for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. He serves on the board of Sustainable Hudson Valley and is a commissioner for the City of Kingston Climate Smart Commission. John is a recipient of an Environmental Protection Agency Environmental Champion Award.
For nearly three decades, John wrote and produced programming for public television and national cable networks to encourage strength and creativity within communities. With Lightworks Producing Group in New York, he worked on many specials and series, and executive produced the civil rights documentaries You Don’t Have to Ride Jim Crow! and Here Am I, Send Me: The Journey of Jonathan Daniels. For PBS, he created, with host Mary Ann Esposito, the cooking series Ciao Italia, still in production and the longest-running cooking series on television.
ELIZABETH KNIGHT is the author of four books that have been featured in New York magazine, USA Today, the Washington Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, and Woman’s Day, among other publications. A tea and entertaining expert and the former tea sommelier for the St. Regis Hotel, she was a frequent guest on over fifty nationwide radio and television programs, including WNBC’s Today in New York and the Travel Channel. For more than twenty years, she managed marketing communications, trade advertising, sales promotion and special events, and visual merchandising for retail stores, wholesale showrooms, and trade shows. Clients included Royal Doulton china, American Express, and Bloomingdale’s, among others.
More recently, she has become a sustainability activist and community organizer. In 2016, she started Orange County, New York’s first Repair Cafe, which, four years on, serves people from as many as nineteen towns in two states. She and her team have received certificates of appreciation from county, town, and village officials. In celebration of Earth Day, Elizabeth founded an annual Too Good to Toss Community Swap, which is visited by hundreds of people who come to shop for free. In October 2018, she organized a pop-up Repair Cafe at the international ReuseConex convention in Cincinnati, Ohio, where Martine Postma, founder of Repair Café International, was the keynote speaker.