Happy birthday to us. This experiment of starting a Repair Cafe has now lasted one year. Some people have come and gone, but there’s still enough dedication to get around a dozen repairs done each month.
Now on to an illustration of what we’re doing here and then onto the big question of “How long will this last?”.
How long will the Repair Cafe go on? Probably as long as the community feels that it’s worth the time and effort to come together. You have to remember, that there’s no federal, state or local funding that can be cut. There’s no venture capitalists who are going to pull the plug, no banks who loaned us any money to get started. This whole thing was bootstrapped by a handful of dedicated individuals and has since expanded out to people who had never heard of a Makerspace, Repair Cafe, or the Independent Media Center (IMC), both of whom hosts our events.
But there are two sides to every coin, While there’s no external group who can take us down, there’s also nobody else to prop us up. It’s just us. And nobody is getting paid to do this work. Not in money anyway. Yet, so far, we’ve persisted. This tells us something. It implies that the payment of knowledge, skills, experience, and environmental and financial impacts are worth the cost of showing up for a couple hours a month.
If that balance ever changes, then the Repair Cafe will go away and free up the people lamenting its demise to start something new, which is hopefully more valuable to society.
By “valuable” I’m not talking about money. If you’ve read my previous blog posts, or comments on social media, you’ve probably noticed that I don’t equate value with money. For example, shutting down coal plants is valuable even though it doesn’t bring in any money (directly). But the value is clear to the people who have to breathe the air nearby, the people who depend on the water that could be contaminated by the coal ash, and those who have to weather the storm of climate change.
I can’t speak for the other founders of the Repair Cafe, but the idea of starting a project that failed was ominous. Why bother starting something that will fail? Over the past year, that’s changed for me. I’ve come to terms with the idea that if the community doesn’t find sometime valuable, it should cease to exist. Continuing to pour time and effort into something that doesn’t meaningfully benefit either oneself or society is a misallocation of resources. It’d be better to free those people up to do something that is more useful.
I think the thing that made the biggest impact was that people did see the Repair Cafe as being valuable. They’ve been showing up. They’ve been contributing labor, parts, materials, and money. When working on this project, I’m not spending my time and energy doing something that nobody cares about. It makes it clear that banding together with others and taking the risk of starting this project was worth it. What’s harder to see is that it would have still been worth starting even if hardly anyone cared! I don’t think it would be worth continuing if that were the case, but we don’t know that until we gave it a try.
If I have a call to action in all this, it’s to think about where you’re spending your time and energy. Imagine what it would be like if you ditched the parts that were more cost than benefit. What would you do with the extra time you have? The answers will be different for everyone. Maybe it’s being giving up doomscrolling, or dealing with an addition to the news cycle or politics. Maybe it’s less reading about interesting things on the internet and shifting to doing those interesting things, even if nobody posts about it online. Perhaps the answer will be there’s nothing that can be improved, but it doesn’t hurt to reflect from time to time.
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