Let us raise a standard to which the Wise and Honest can repair.
— George Washington, 1787
Used to be, every town had its repair shops. Everyone knew where to go when they needed something fixed. That know-how was often close at hand, practiced by parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, neighbors, or a local “fix-it man.” We can call this a remnant of the Great Depression, of course, but its roots stretch back to Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard and the tradition of Yankee thrift.
How has our society changed? The immediate answer, almost always, is that we no longer get things repaired because ours has become a throwaway culture. The economic explanation for this is that since World War II, the world has embraced the materials economy, that is to say, a wasteful, rather than regenerative, use of precious resources. As the axiom coined by Twitter cofounder Evan Williams puts it, “Convenience decides everything.” The argument can’t be made that this is sustainable.
But if there is a Repair Cafe or Fixit Clinic or Tool Library in your town, you have a different answer. The place to get something fixed is at the library or a church or your town hall or community center. The concept couldn’t be simpler: whatever you call it, wherever it is held, a community repair event invites you to bring a beloved but broken item to be repaired for free, by an expert who is also your neighbor.
There’s one catch. This is not a drop-off service. You bring your item and stay with it during the repair process. You sit down and describe what it’s not doing that it’s supposed to be doing, when it stopped working, and where you think the defect might be. This is not a monetary transaction — it’s an interpersonal transaction.
The consumer economy is powerful. The growing repair culture is a countervailing force: community initiatives that are creative, socially vibrant platforms for building awareness about the larger challenges facing our planet.
There is something about the act of repairing that motivates and satisfies deeply felt parts of our nature. We can trace this insight back to Aristotle: one of the greatest sources of human enjoyment is being able to enact one’s knowledge, to share what you know. The act of repairing involves “troubleshooting,” which to many people is an irresistible proposition.
Repairing in Community Is Powerful
All over the world, people are pooling their resources, sharing information, and learning how to be more than just consumers. They are learning to be fixers. And they are starting to fix their world.
— Northeast Recycling Council
Repair culture is about these things: Extending the life of stuff that you care about or rely on. Feeding your curiosity about the way things work. Using tools and using your hands. Honoring, preserving, and passing on repair know-how. Sitting elbow-to-elbow at a worktable with your neighbor. Sharing skills. Reducing waste. Making friends.
You might think that the most common comment people offer about their experience at a repair event is something like “I’m so glad they fixed it” or “It was free.” But the words people use more than any other, hands down, to describe their Repair Cafe experience are “It was fun.”
Almost every item people bring has meaning to them. Every item comes with a story. Laughter and tears are common. Some of the comments our customers leave are straightforward description: “Pants mended.” “Clock fixed.” “Toddler bike now roadworthy.” “$200 printer back in service after the company said, ‘Buy a new one.’” Others are more effusive: “I can’t begin to tell you what an absolutely lovely and wonderful experience this has been.” “There is a strong beam of hope and light coming from this space.”
Every repair event is locally organized. Partners include libraries, congregations, town boards, environmental and conservation groups, Rotary Clubs, climate activists, and at least one County Emergency Communications Association. Librarians say they love repair events because they offer hands-on, intergenerational learning. Faith communities embrace the theological aspect: this is caring for creation. County waste management or resource recovery agencies recognize the value of any grassroots initiative that will help slow down the pace of waste reaching their landfills. Clubs from technical colleges and school districts bring their team spirit, and high school and college students commonly volunteer to get community service credit. Not surprisingly, the kids often end up behind the digital worktable — or with their hands on a sewing machine, some for the first time.
When journalist Harry Smith brought the NBC Nightly News crew to our Repair Cafe in New Paltz, New York, he beautifully interpreted what he found: “The idea is exquisitely simple: neighbor helping neighbor. They fix a lot of stuff. Things left in attics and garages. Things that just stopped working. And what we marveled at was the care, the meticulous, painstaking care that goes into every repair.”
WHY WE DO IT
•To transform our throwaway culture, one beloved item at a time
•To reduce how much stuff goes into the waste stream
•To preserve repair know-how and skills, and pass them on (re-skilling!)
•To show the people who have this knowledge that they are valued
•To feed our curiosity about the way things work, be creative, and have fun!
•To build community resilience
An Idea from Amsterdam
Weggooien? Mooi niet! [“Toss it? I don’t think so!”]
— The motto of the Repair Café International Foundation
By 2009, Amsterdam journalist Martine Postma had reported extensively on sustainability and the plight of our planet. She hoped that her stories had helped change minds and attitudes, but after the birth of her second child, she wanted to do something more. “In Europe, we throw out so many things,” she reflected in a 2012 interview with the New York Times. “It’s a shame, because the things we throw away are usually not that broken. There are more and more people in the world, and we can’t keep handling things the way we do. But how do you try to do this as a normal person in your daily life?”
Inspired by a local design exhibition that focused on repair and creative reuse, Martine organized the world’s first Repair Cafe in the lobby of a movie theatre. “Sustainability discussions are often about ideals, about what could be,” Martine said. “This is very hands on, very concrete. It’s about doing something together, in the here and now. Repair Cafes attract people who are not at the center of attention in everyday society, but here they become heroes.”
The Netherlands was the perfect place for this idea to take hold. In a small country, long focused on beating back the sea and reclaiming the land, the deeply rooted historical mindset is very much about how to live within limits. Yet make no mistake, prosperity has allowed for plenty of consumer buying by the broad middle class. As Martine says, the Netherlands is no less a throwaway culture than the United States.
The idea caught on almost immediately. The media loved it. Within a year, each of Holland’s thirteen provinces had started one or more Repair Cafes. The Dutch Ministry of the Environment decided to fund the creation of a Repair Café Foundation. From there the concept jumped borders and cultures quickly.
The idea is eminently replicable. The first Repair Cafe in the United States popped up in October 2012 in Palo Alto, California (in Silicon Valley — surprise!). In rapid succession, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and Pasadena, California, followed. Our Repair Cafe in New Paltz, New York, was close behind, the fourth to open within six months. In each of those towns, someone had read that interview with Martine Postma the previous May, reporting on what was then a strictly European phenomenon: “An Effort to Bury a Throwaway Culture One Repair at a Time.”
As of this writing, there are more than 150 Repair Cafes in the United States. The largest concentration is in the Northeast, with fifty or so in eastern New York and northern New Jersey and another fifty in Massachusetts and the other New England states. The upper Midwest and the West Coast are the next most “repairing” regions. Sprinkled around the country, you will find regular events in Colorado, Ohio, and the D.C. and Philly areas, plus outposts in Fairbanks, Alaska; Honolulu, Hawaii; Lincoln, Nebraska; Ellensburg, Washington; Moscow, Idaho; Houston, Texas; the Research Triangle of North Carolina; and St. Petersburg, Florida — with wide open spaces in between.
In one relatively small region — the Hudson Valley, Catskills, and Capital District of New York State — we saw more than 120 events in 2019, in forty communities in twelve counties. These events involved the time of more than six hundred volunteers who brought everything from advanced electronics skills to the wherewithal to make a mean cup of tea. The very social “cafe” side of each event thrives on home-baked treats, fruit, coffee, and tea.
This book will explore the reasons for all this growth, the extraordinary appeal of the idea, and why we believe it can — and should — be replicated in some way everywhere.
One of us, John, worked for many years in communications, as a writer-producer and executive producer of television programming for public broadcasting and cable networks. Always on the lookout for creative ways to build community, he recognized an overlap in the skill sets needed to produce television shows and to organize a repair initiative: both involve bringing together a group of people with diverse skills and backgrounds to work on a common vision. When he moved to the Hudson Valley, asking people for their ideas about starting a Repair Cafe became a kind of “passport” to his new community and a way of sharing interests with people he might otherwise never have met. He describes his role as that of coordinator, communicator, and cheerleader for Repair Cafes in the Hudson Valley, Catskills, and Capital District of New York State, as well as for the repair movement globally. An amateur woodworker since he was a kid, John brings his tools to as many Repair Cafes as he can.
Coauthor Elizabeth is a U.S. Air Force “brat” (her dad served thirty years’ active duty) who has lived in at least eight states and two foreign countries. Her mother’s mantra, “There’s no such thing as a stranger, just friends whose names you don’t yet know,” led to careers in marketing communications, special events, and the hospitality industry; she wrote several books about entertaining with tea, “the social lubricant.” Shortly after she moved to the Hudson Valley, Elizabeth visited a Repair Cafe held in a nearby town. Impressed by the fix-it skills and warm welcome that volunteers extended to all the strangers who walked through the door, clutching wobbly chairs, wonky lamps, and torn clothes, she determined to start the first Repair Cafe in her county. Four years on, she and her team of dedicated volunteers continue to host friends, neighbors, and strangers, offering all a steaming cuppa while they wait to get their beloved but broken items fixed.
John invited Elizabeth to join him as coauthor of this book after reading a year’s worth of the follow-up reports she wrote to her volunteers after every Warwick Repair Cafe. The pictures she painted in words captured the spirit and essence of community repair with insight and personality, telling the stories of the people who brought things, and the people who fixed them. John knew that is exactly what this book would need.
A Fixed Thing Is a Beautiful Thing
I’ve got a shrieking blender here! Can you fix it?
— Email from a concerned citizen
Ever heard of a Magic Quartz Cooker? They made them in the sixties. Ellen James remembers her mother using one to broil fish year-round on the back porch, “to keep that fishy smell out of the house, don’t you know.” Ellen brought her broken cooker to the Repair Cafe, our volunteers put their heads together (many repairs are collaborative), and Ellen left impressed and happy. “Swell crowd,” she wrote in our comments book.
What else gets fixed at a Repair Cafe? Lamps are item number one in the USA (in Europe, it’s coffee makers). Then a lot of vacuum cleaners, CD and DVD players, countertop appliances, pants and skirts, necklaces, picture frames, and wobbly chairs. Beyond that, anything under the sun, really. Elisa and Ray brought their classic-but-not-working electronic “Simon” game (madly popular in the 1980s) so that their teenage daughter Bella, who also came, would be able to play it (and okay, so that Elisa could show off her skills). Kimiko Link’s daughter brought her baby doll with a smushed face, and Felicia Casey at our Dolls & Stuffed Animals worktable made her feel better. Meanwhile, high school kids reconfigured laptops, tablets, and smartphones. The joke among our volunteers is, I wonder what’s going to walk in the door today?
The “core” repair categories are mechanical, electrical, electronic and digital, clothing and textiles, jewelry, things made of wood, bicycles, and blade sharpening. Gas engines are the one category that most Repair Cafes eschew, for the simple reason that they’re dirty and noisy.
Fixing is not an all-or-nothing endeavor. We like to say that there are three possible outcomes for the item you bring. “Repaired” means the problem was figured out and fixed, and you may have participated in the repair. At the other end of the spectrum is the “Beyond Repair” outcome, where the item isn’t fixable for any of a number of reasons. The pronouncement “Tried, Dead, and Done” frees you to recycle or responsibly dispose of a useless thing, with the satisfaction that you followed its useful life to its end. Or you may carry it over to the Kids Take It Apart Table, our popular “learning lab,” where it will end its life in pieces. Finally, there’s the third, in-between possibility, “Half Repaired” — which is also valuable. Your item wasn’t fixed, but your coach identified the issue and suggested possible solutions and a next step. If a replacement part is needed, you might order it from the local hardware store and bring it along to the next Repair Cafe. Or you may now know enough to fix it yourself. The common denominator in all three scenarios is this: you learned something about the way things work. You may have even gained a new appreciation for the stuff in your life.
Who Does the Fixing?
I feel like we were all part of something important. We’ll definitely be doing this again!
— Repair Cafe volunteer
We call them “repair coaches.” These are guys and gals with significant skills who volunteer their time for three or four hours one Saturday every other month, or every third month. Some run professional repair businesses, and this offers them a way to be out in the community so that people know who they are and what they have to offer. Some are retired, with a lifetime of experience and knowledge. Others are simply passionate about one thing or another: the “lost art” of darning or the intricacies of a pendulum clock. Within each community there are people who bring other skills or passions: metal welding, digital photo restoration, plant care, chair massage, editorial “wordsmithing.” Call them “fix-perts” if you like; many repair coaches are people with skills that have been lost to modern convenience, retained from an era when more people worked with their hands. Other skill sets, of course, are wholly of the twenty-first century, such as anything having to do with the latest iPhone or Android release or gaming device. There is a common narrative among repair coaches: when they were kids, they liked to take stuff apart. When they couldn’t put it back together, their curiosity was sparked. They were on their way.
Make no mistake: this is often a sophisticated level of repair; it’s typical to find current or retired engineers in the mix. Technical skills are necessary. But interpersonal skills are even more important. The connections that people make as they attempt to repair things (and mostly succeed) is not beside the point — it is the point. “I find that people are receptive to learning how to make some of the repairs themselves,” one of our repair coaches observes. “If I can enable someone to figure out how to do something on their own, I have helped build their confidence and perhaps taught them a few things. People often think they ‘can’t do anything’ and are pleasantly surprised when they realize that a simple repair can be easily done with a little tutoring. It’s a win-win for both of us.” Early on we received great encouragement and good advice from Peter Mui, the MIT grad who started the network of Fixit Clinics across the United States. He said, “Keep your volunteers happy. Their skills are your linchpin. Good pizza will be a key factor in your success.”
We can’t guarantee that the item you bring will get fixed. All we can guarantee is that you’ll have an interesting time. And so the table is set: You have something broken that you’d like to keep. Repair coaches have the savvy to help you. The level of gratification is high on both sides of the table. Pull up a chair and see what happens.
The Signal We Send
By the time I walked out of there, I thought: This is the way the world should work.
— Manna Jo Greene, Ulster County legislator
The Repair Café International Foundation likes to collect data. We all do. Towns want to know what the measurable impact of all of this activity is. How many? How much? So here are some numbers. A typical Repair Cafe in the United States attracts about fifty people in the space of four hours, many of whom bring two items. Our repair success rate averages anywhere from 70 to 85 percent. In 2019, the Repair Café Foundation collected records for more than 24,000 repair events worldwide, which resulted in an estimated 432,000 repaired products being saved from the “waste mountain” and which, according to the calculation method used by a British researcher, prevented 22.8 million pounds of CO2 from reaching the atmosphere. (An average person in the Western world causes CO2 emissions of about 22,000 pounds per year.)
Repair Cafes are good at extending the useful life of everyday items. But as impressive as the growth of repair initiatives has been internationally, no number of laptops and lamps diverted from the waste stream will ever make a difference at the scale needed to transform the global economy or draw down the carbon in our oceans and atmosphere. If that is not the goal, what is?
In conversations with Martine, we’ve talked a lot about the impact of Repair Cafes, and we believe the data don’t capture the movement’s true significance. That significance is the signal the events generate (to use Martine’s appropriate metaphor), the signal received by people who walk into a Repair Cafe for the first time in their town. That signal says, We are better off when we see our own community in the midst of cooperation, creativity, and downright decency, in a place where goals are achieved and positive outcomes are realized.
“The value of the Repair Cafe,” says William McDonough, an architect and coauthor of the influential book Cradle to Cradle, “is that people are going back into a relationship with the material things around them.” Evelien H. Tonkens, a sociology professor at the University of Amsterdam, agrees. “It’s very much a sign of the times,” says Dr. Tonkens, who notes that the Repair Cafe’s “anticonsumerist, anti-market, do-it-ourselves ethos” reflects a more general trend to improve the world through grassroots social activism.
And here we can underscore one more attribute about community repair projects: they do not self-select for any political point of view. Everyone has broken stuff, and this speaks to egalitarianism. Sitting down with a neighbor to troubleshoot what’s wrong with your stuff helps bridge the partisan divide — or any other divide — that may separate you in another setting.
Repair culture is a tail wagging the dog. It is an active, participatory volunteer gig that animates the larger imperative of sustainability and community.
“LET US RAISE A STANDARD TO WHICH THE WISE AND HONEST CAN REPAIR.”
George Washington is said to have spoken these words during the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia in 1787. Handed down to us as useful guidance, Washington’s words are now printed inside every U.S. passport. The word repair here means “take refuge” or “find security in.” The word standard can refer either to a principle or to a military flag — and General George Washington may have meant to invoke both meanings. Which is fine: we repairers do raise a flag to the virtues of wisdom and honesty.
This quote has become our motto, referring to the standard of wisdom and honesty that we see people experience at a Repair Cafe. Wisdom is knowledge gained from experience. Honesty speaks to the nature of our relationships, to treating each other with respect, as we would wish to be treated. Honesty is the authenticity people experience, the signal they receive, when they walk into a Repair Cafe and “see their own community in the midst of cooperation, creativity, and downright decency.” It bridges ideological and political divides. It is essentially patriotic. In a period of divisiveness, we can all look to George Washington for courage, wisdom, and inspiration. And let us not forget that Washington helped lead a revolution of ideas and ideals that changed the world.
Where This Book Will Take Us
Imagine a world worth fighting for, a way forward. It’s important to imagine that we can repair. Ideate a world where repair has happened, and work toward that.
— Anna Rose Keefe, conservation assistant, RISD Museum of Art
This is the first book to attempt to pull together the thousand threads of a rapidly growing movement that is remarkably intergenerational, pervasive, and culturally vibrant. And yet it must be said that we are attempting to capture lightning in a bottle. The repair movement encompasses a fast-moving global community, sharing news and ideas constantly on social media platforms. Repair is in the zeitgeist.
We see the repair movement as both an innovation and a reemergence. To make that case, we will explore the historical and social context of repair. We’ll delve into the rich layers of meaning embodied in the ethos of repair and draw lessons about balancing our human economy with “ecological economics.” Many of the women and men who do these repairs have thought deeply about why they do it and why it matters, and we will share the eminently practical lessons they’ve learned. The act of mending also profoundly mirrors the brokenness and healing we experience in human relationships and connects with our sense of individual and social well-being. Some of this wisdom is philosophical and theological, expressed variously through the concepts of tikkun olam, Hebrew for “repair of the world,” the Zen aesthetic of wabi-sabi, the monastic practice of radical hospitality, or the Indigenous worldview known as “re-weaving the basket of life.” The wisdom of repair is creative, commonsensical, and — in a throwaway world — radical.
There is nothing proprietary about the idea of people getting together to fix stuff. Peter Mui opened his first Fixit Clinic in Berkeley, California, in 2009, and Vincent Lai held his first Fixers Collective in Brooklyn, New York, in 2010. Since then, community repair initiatives have propagated like some fantastic garden: Repair Labs and Hubs, Fix-It Fridays, Make Do & Mend-It Circles, Restart Parties, Tool Libraries, Men’s Sheds and Fix It Sisters Sheds, Tinkerages, Remakeries, and at least one Dare to Repair Cafe. Upcycling, freecycling, and the Maker movement proliferate in all their funky, creative glory. In Berkeley, the Culture of Repair Project defines its mission as “working across sectors to restore repair as a basic social value.” In the suburbs, you hear the rallying cry “Bring back shop class and home economics!” There is a strong affinity between Repair Cafes and the Right to Repair movement, which challenges unfair and deceptive company policies that make it difficult, expensive, or impossible for you to repair the things you own. Right to repair initiatives combine social justice, environmental, and DIY activism in the political arena.
Repair is educational by definition, requiring observation, deductive reasoning, knowledge of scientific principles or craft techniques, and creative problem solving. Repair coaches are pretty curious by nature, and most see every item that gets to their worktable as an opportunity to learn something new (although I’ll allow that the umpteenth lamp may be an exception). Still, we find there is a bit of the teacher in most of our volunteers, and the opportunity to mentor would-be repair coaches, including special needs learners, is a strong attribute of repair culture.
The contributions that Repair Cafes and other repair and reuse events make in their communities are all acts of caring, both on the individual level and on the global level as the impacts of climate change become more and more evident. Volunteerism is all around us, but what Repair Cafes offer volunteers can be more meaningful and, judging from the comments we receive, more fun than most. Habitat for Humanity ReStores are natural partners, as many donations need to be “readied” (repaired) for resale. In the private sector, there are stories to tell about how and why some companies, Patagonia and Eileen Fisher among them, have integrated repair and reuse into their corporate culture. We know that this kind of eco-tribalism can create consumer bonds and loyalty, and time will tell whether these campaigns are truly a long-term commitment to sustainability.
The Repair Cafe concept has translated well. There are now more than two thousand Repair Cafes in thirty-three countries, with 330 of those starting up in 2019 alone. From their experiences (many post on Instagram), we can see differences in the way societies view volunteer-ism or embrace the idea of repairing and reusing personal property. Reparemos (“we repair”) is established in La Paz, Santiago, and Unete, Mexico; and in Temuco, Chile: “Together we repair it. Not always successfully, but free and with love.” In India, repair is inexpensive and available in every marketplace, but repair advocate Purna Sarkar in Bengaluru sees their activities as a way to help bridge caste, creed, and religious differences. The Gaia Foundation in London has provocatively redesigned the mantra widely known as the “three Rs” — Reduce, Reuse, Recycle — and expanded it to include seven Rs (see next page). The fixers in Wembley, Australia, say it is eight. Whatever the number, recycling is always the last, the furthest downstream. In the twenty-first century, the pressure is on to rethink business as usual. As social historian Susan Strasser states in her book Waste and Want, “Economic development has created persistent assaults on the global ecosystem from air and water pollution and global warming, as well as from solid waste. These problems are urgent, and the solution will not come from going backward in time.”
In titling this book Repair Revolution, we mean to indicate a change in mindset and a return to social values that is anything but sudden. This revolution has deep cultural and historical roots and has been building for at least ten years. It also requires resolution — the personal decision to improve a situation, inseparable from ethics. “Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach,” writes Clarissa Pinkola Estés, author of Women Who Run with the Wolves. The repair revolution draws the largest circle possible, to welcome everyone.
The goal of this book is to inspire and encourage people everywhere to start a Repair Cafe — or something like it — in their community. We’ll zero in on what’s involved and provide a road map for starting your own. At the same time, we know that not everyone wants to take on the task of organizing, and so we encourage you to get involved in any way you’d like, starting, of course, by bringing something that’s broken or needs mending. You might think, “Oh, what a nice idea, fixing things for your neighbors.” But it’s much more than a nice idea, and until you go to a community repair event and feel the generosity, creativity, and sense of purpose in the room, you won’t really know what this is. A rewarding experience awaits.
Try a little experiment. Tell someone about the idea of a “community meeting place to bring a beloved but broken item to be repaired, for free.” Slow down a little when you say the words “beloved but broken.” See how they register with the listener. We think you’ll like the response.