The Culture of Repair Project Vision

The purpose of Community Repair Events is:

• To cultivate awareness of the bigger picture and of the pronounced impact reuse has on the environment, on personal well-being, and on our community's resiliency;

• To cultivate motivation to extend the life of the things we have through repair; and

• To cultivate the capacity to repair, through learning to fix things ourselves, or finding out how and where to have them repaired.

Variations on a Theme

The many thousands of Community Repair Events around the globe can have slightly different emphases and take various forms. 

The principle common objectives among different formats 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 extending the life of what we already have makes.

The common format is volunteers who know how to fix things getting together with people who don't to bring broken things back to life. 

The common thing Community Repair Events largely aren’t is free repair services — drop off your broken item for later retrieval.  Generally speaking, participants are “participants”: they’re involved.

Participation can mean hands-on, and it can mean observing goodwill meet with expertise in the form of a volunteer’s fixing their broken thing. The point is to gather together to repair objects. Learning, empowerment and shifting mindset take care of themselves in this context.

Speaking generally, beyond those commonalities are slightly different emphases and structures:

• Fixit Clinics lean into educating and empowering people to fix things themselves and has a strong STEM orientation.

• Repair Cafes are more heterogeneous, often leaning into community building around fixing. Some Repair Cafés encourage people to fix their own things; in others, volunteer fixers repair items in the presence of participants. Repair Cafés frequently incorporate other elements, such as children's tinker zones, ecology resource libraries, social bars offering coffee, tea, bagels and croissants — even massage and blood pressure stations.

• The Restart Project’s work is grounded in electronics but, like other community repair events, they also address the larger spectrum of our broken objects.

Many other unaffiliated groups host variations on the theme.  For example:

• Community Glue in Chicago

• Fixers Collective in Brooklyn

• Philly Fixers Guild in Philadelphia

• RepairPDX in Portland

Less Evident Benefits of Community Repair Events

Local economy:  Community Repair Events are not about competing with or supplanting local repair shops.  Rather, events support them through raising people's awareness and inciting their motivation to fix.  Fixers and organizers make referrals to local repair shops and suppliers, which means good jobs.

Personal benefits include:  individual empowerment, personal satisfaction, developing critical thinking skills, and changing the way people relate with material objects. 

Community Repair Events In the News

Fixit Clinic on The News Hour
Short video on the inaugural Berkeley Repair Café in Berkeleyside
Transition Berkeley video of their Repair Cafés: Transition Berkeley Repair Café
Repair Café on Al Jazeera
Repair Café on NBC Nightly News
Overview of Palo Alto Repair Café
Fixit Clinic founder Peter Mui interviewed by iFixit
Fixit Clinic on CBS News
Repair Café in The New York Times