This is a bit late, but I still wanted to recap what happened last month at the Repair Cafe. Relatedly, the call for help this time around is asking for people who are good at logistics. More on that at the end. As always, click the pictures to see the whole thing.
We had some additional items that we didn’t manage to snap a picture of such as a blender that seized up, a clothes iron that had a cord that would only partially retract, and a dress that was made whole again.
As you can see, there’s been a steady stream of people bringing things in, and enough mentors helping them fix their stuff. The community has gotten in a pretty good groove, and the culture is excellent. Virtually everyone is patient and polite, expresses gratitude for one another’s help, and is not conditional upon the repair being successful. Sometimes people have to wait because we don’t have enough mentors, and they’re always understanding.
I’m always thinking about what would help the community become more sustainable and grow to help keep more things out of the landfill, let people save more money, and teach people valuable skills.
The biggest help would be to have two people take the lead on outreach. This can be as simple as posting on social media and distributing fliers to groups that you’re attending (e.g. environmental, mutual aid, and/or sports clubs). It only takes a couple minutes per month, and having multiple people would help when someone is too busy or forgets. It also reaches different places where people have never heard of the Repair Cafe.
If you’d like to help even more, you could give a presentation, or co-present with another Repair Cafe regular. On the other side of that equation, if you’re a part of a group and you’d like to invite someone to give a Repair Cafe presentation, the best way to do so would be to post the the mailing list to find a volunteer.
The moral of the story here is that these events don’t spontaneously happen, it only seems like they do. It requires repeated outreach to remind people that the event exists. We’ve had good traction on people sharing on Nextdoor, but less so on Mastodon and we’re not aware of anyone posting on the billionaire’s platforms at all (Facebook, X, Instagram, etc.). If you are on these platforms, consider this your call to action, because I don’t have an account on any of those.
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