Another 9 things came into the Repair Cafe in August. Six were repaired, one will be repaired after they order the necessary part, and the rest couldn’t be fixed (at least, not on the spot). As usual, we’ll show off some pictures of some of the things that we did, and this time we’ll wrap up by highlighting some organizations which are similar to the Repair Cafe.
You’re reading this blog, so clearly you know about the Repair Cafe, but did you know there are other organizations doing similar work, many of whom have been around longer than our project?
REcompute is a local project that accepts donations of old, working laptops and gives them a second life in the hands of someone who needs a mobile computer. The person behind this project only accepts working computers, because there’s no sponsor who will buy parts to fix them up. That’s what makes it such a great project to combine with the Repair Cafe. If you have an old, broken laptop, you can bring it to the Repair Cafe to learn how to fix it, and then donate the working laptop to REcompute! They’ll take care of making sure all your data is wiped and make sure the software is is working order before putting it into the hands of someone else in the community. If you or someone you know has an old laptop that’s just sitting around collecting dust, this would be a great destination for it.
Community Tech Time (flier below) is a local project that helps people use technology. If your email isn’t working, if you think your computer has a virus, if you want to know how to get files from your computer to your phone without going through some corporate cloud service… this is the place to turn. They are funded by the University of Illinois, which means they have paid staff and operate multiple times per week. They’ll absolutely try to help you with anything you bring them, but they’re more focused on education and software, whereas the Repair Cafe is more focused on hardware repairs.
The IMC’s Community Night has a bunch of fun activities (painting, karaoke), people helping one another take a stand against disposable culture (Repair Cafe and The Really Really Free Market run by FreeCU), and various other community and government projects. They change it up a little from time to time too. For example, there will be a strong showing from labor unions in September.
Another project that is related in the sense that it’s community members taking care of one another, reducing people’s costs, and teaching new skills is the Food Autonomy Block (flier below). They’re encouraging people to talk to your neighbors and have a little (or big!) garden. They can help connect people who want to do this with those who are already doing this.
There are many more, and we’d love for more people to know about all them. Not everything will be of interest to everyone, but they’re all of interest to someone. The key is to spread news of them far and wide so those people who are interested in these projects can find out about them. It’s all too often that people find out about super-cool projects after they’ve already fizzled out. Lets have less of that and more of people working together to build something positive. I think we could all agree that the world could use more positivity!
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