Another month, another Repair Cafe in the history books, and this one was exceptional. This month we had two events: community night on the third Tuesday, and our regular event on the third Thursday. The Environmental group from the Volunteer Illini Project (VIP) came out in full force to act as mentors last Thursday. We typically have 4-6 volunteers every month, this time it was about 17! We’re getting progressively better organized and are improving our processes to accommodate larger numbers of both mentors and repairers. We also had multiple generous non-monetary donations, fixed some stuff, gave some advice, and helped teach others to be more self-sufficient.
As is tradition, I’ll share some of the repairs that were attempted, the highlights of the night from my perspective, and some overall closing thoughts/a call for help.
My favorite item was the big screen TV that came in with a cracked screen. Those can’t be fixed, but while people were discussing how to dispose of it properly, a mentor stepped up and said since it was only a small part of the screen which was broken, they’d be happy take it home and use it as is. So they got a free TV, the previous owner didn’t have to deal with it, and it stayed out of the landfill. Beautiful!
The other highlight was to see people acting as both mentors and students at the same time. This is how a mutual aid group is supposed to work, but it’s very different than what society tends to expect. The usual expectation is that there’s someone who knows more and they are the teacher, and the people who know less is the student. This works fine in some contexts, but in interdisciplinary activities it’s much less likely to be true. For example, someone who is experienced in mechanical repairs might not be an expert in electronics. When a vacuum comes in, we don’t always know what type of problem it’ll be until we investigate. If it’s an electrical issue, we’ll pull in a second mentor to help out and the mentor gets to learn a little bit about diagnosing electronics along with the product owner/repairer.
The other highlight is that, for the second month in a row, we’ve had very generous material donations from the list on our event page. We got a huge assortment of clamps, a small hinge, epoxy and JB Weld. Our local community is amazing, and seeing people come together like this is honestly a large part of the reason I help spend so much of my time coordinating these events. People come in and get help for free, with no obligation to make any donation, volunteer their time, or any other catches. Yet they voluntarily give back in some way. This is what’s sometimes called the “value for value” model. We provide a value to anyone who comes in the door, and those who are willing and able to reciprocate frequently do. If there’s no reciprocation, it’s always unsustainable in the long run. The event is still young, having not even been around for a full year yet, so time will tell if we’ll still be doing this in 5-10 years. Given the economic environment and the gloomy predictions, I certainly hope that we will be, as this project seems like it will only be more important as marches on.
It’s also important to note that we get donations from people who do not have anything to repair too. These come from people who might now have anything to repair, perhaps because they just fix things themselves at home, but they love what we’re doing and want to make sure they’re helping. This includes all of our mentors’ time as well as some tools and materials.
We do accept money, and that’s important for things like paying the rent and power bill and so on, but we’d much rather have people bring in tools and materials they don’t need anymore than to use cash donations to go out and buy brand new tools and supplies.
On to the bigger picture: the biggest place where we need help is spreading the word about our existence. If there’s anyone out there who is interested in posting on social media, please reach out via electronic mail to repaircafe ax makerspaceurbana.org so we can collaborate. If you have time to make just one post on each platform per month and follow up on the comments, that’d be an enormous help. Heck, I’d be happy to have a person who is willing to do that on a single platform (X, Facebook, TikTok, etc.).
Every month I also try to reach out to at least one more community group to try to help raise awareness about what we’re doing. What can you do to help in this front? Print some fliers and distribute them to your local sewing group, technology enthusiast meetup, board gaming group, bouldering crew, the regulars at the pub, or whatever else you do with other people. If it’s a group that meets online, download and share digital copies of our fliers. You don’t have to be able to answer all their questions. We’ve got the event page, and blog posts like this one. Or they can just drop by and we can answer questions in person.
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