You can tell Spring has arrived when people are so busy it takes almost a month to get around to posting the recap of a month event. Haha. But we’re still here, as always, hanging out, sharing knowledge, helping people save some money, and trying to keep as much out of landfills as possible.
As is typically the case, we don’t have pictures of all the repairs. We don’t have enough volunteers to have anyone dedicated to photography, blogs or social media posts. If you can pitch in think that kind of thing sounds like fun, sign up for the mailing list and let people know.
As for updates on the bigger picture, we’re settled into a pretty stable state at this point. The thing we could use most is more people willing to spend a couple hours, once or twice a month to volunteer to help folks fix things. And you don’t need to be an expert to do this. You can shadow someone first and learn how to sew, diagnose electronics, or do mechanical repairs. What you do need is the will to help people.
For some context, we frequently only have a single volunteer on the IMC’s Community Nights and they’re trying to check people in, help everyone with their repairs, explain what our group does and why, and snap a few photos to share with others. That’s in addition with all the setup and tear down tasks, lugging things up the stairs from the Makerspace and returning them at the end of the night.
Our third Thursday events are both better staffed and better attended, but even then we might only have 5 mentors to diagnose and repair a dozen items in 2 hours.
We will get by whether we get any more regular volunteers or not. The real question is whether people find the work we do valuable enough to help spread the word and ask their friends, family and neighbors to join in? This project doesn’t work because of the dedicated group of individuals we have showing up at each event. It works because of all the people who come in from time to time chip in to tell others. Be the change you want to see in the world.
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