Community Repair Events
The essential elements of Community Repair Events are teaching and emboldening people to fix their own things, encouraging a shift in how we think about our possessions, and raising awareness around the profound impact made by extending the life of what we already have.
Hudson Valley Repair Café, New York: "Toss it? No way!"
“‘Everyone is in such a great mood’ at these events, Cotton said. ‘There’s this sense of community and camaraderie, and everyone is learning and everyone is teaching at the same time. It’s more than just ‘Come and get your broken stuff fixed.’ It’s more about building community.’”
— Darren Cotton, Buffalo NY Tool Library, The Wirecutter
What It Is …
Folks who know how to fix things get together with folks who don't, and work together to bring broken things back to life. Along the way, the more important objective is accomplished: Raising people's awareness of the imperative of extending the lifespan of the things we have by fixing them rather than prematurely discarding and replacing them.
Repair Cafe Palo Alto was the first Repair Café established in the U.S. (Now Silicon Valley Repair Café)
Community Repair Events are sweeping the globe — thousands of Repair Cafés around the world affiliated with Amsterdam's Repair Café Foundation, hundreds of Fixit Clinic events nationwide, hundreds of London-based Restart Project’s "Restart Parties" across the UK and the continent, and many, many stand-alone initiatives, such as Chicago's Community Glue Workshop, Portland's Repair PDX and Brooklyn's Fixers' Collective.
Young people are a target audience at Fixit Clinics.
Community Repair Events can have different formats. For example, Fixit Clinic are explore-and-discover STEM workshops focused on learning through fixing.
Repair Cafés are usually also concerned with developing social infrastructure and community resilience, so often also host complementary activities related to repair, reuse and community well-being.
The heart of both is fixing — community members come together to help each other repair what’s broken. Neither is a free repair service — they’re free participatory events. Participants work with volunteer fixers toward repairs.
These videos communicate not only what community repair events are, but demonstrate one way people can respond to waste, planned obsolescence, barriers to repair, the consumption-driven economy, consumer dis-empowerment, and related.
What Community Repair Events Are:
Check out — Palo Alto Repair Café video (3:28 min)
Check out — Berkeley Repair Café video (1:54 min)
Check out — Fixit Clinic video (3:23 min)
Check out — Restart Parties video (4:19 min)
See “How to Start One” for more on the vision behind community repair events and the practicalities of starting one yourself.
Which you can!
It’s not difficult. Every one of the many thousands of events and groups was formed by a regular person who wanted to make a difference.