Shortly before television writer/producer John Wackman moved to Ulster County in 2012, he came across a piece in The New York Times titled “Letter from Amsterdam.” It changed the arc of his life and sparked a regional movement.
The article’s author was a journalist from Amsterdam named Martine Postma, and she was telling the story of how she founded the first-ever Repair Café in 2009 in the lobby of a movie theater. Although the Netherlands, like the US, is in many ways a throwaway consumerist culture, the idea took off there with such meteoric velocity that today, some 1,800 of the world’s 2,000 or so Repair Cafés are located in Western Europe.
“I was fascinated by it,” says Wackman. “I said to myself, ‘What a cool idea!’ Then I moved up here less than a year later, and I thought, ‘I’ll bet this would work.’ I didn’t really know anyone, and it became my passport to the area.”
Taking a job as ambassador for a Sustainable Hudson Valley/Catskill Mountainkeeper solarization project, Wackman began to seek out volunteers who might be interested in sharing their repair skills with their neighbors, free of charge. Rosendale’s Ken Boscher, a/k/a Ken Fix-It, and Laura Petit, director of the New Paltz Reuse and Recycling Center, were among his early converts. Bette Sohm, then-pastor of the New Paltz United Methodist Church, offered the use of her congregation’s community room to host a local gathering.
Wackman wasn’t quite the first American to take inspiration from Postma’s account of the Dutch project’s success; Repair Cafés sprang up in 2012 in Palo Alto, California, followed quickly by Pasadena and Pittsfield, Massachusetts. But the one that he launched in New Paltz was only the fourth in the country. Today there are about 150 total in the US, nearly two-thirds of them in the Northeast, 31 in the Hudson Valley and Catskills. Organizing, coordinating and cheerleading for the repair movement quickly became Wackman’s full-time career.
The Repair Café in Warwick in Orange County got started in 2016, instigated by a former tea sommelier for the St. Regis Hotel and veteran marketing/special events professional named Elizabeth Knight who had been inspired by attending a solar open house. As the Warwick project got underway, Knight began writing reports on each Café gathering to e-mail to the municipal officials who were allowing the group to use the community’s senior center, as well as to her volunteer repair coaches. “I wanted them to know how much I respect what they do,” she says.
The blog-style reports proved popular, especially since many of the coaches are so intent on their own work at a Café event that they don’t get to see the whole picture: “They got excited about the stories that they missed.” John Wackman, who was on the listserv, took notice as well. “She’s a great storyteller. She really captures the spirit of these events.”
So it was that, soon after a literary agent approached Wackman in 2017 at a Repair Café in Beacon, saying, “I think there’s a book in this,” he asked Knight to collaborate with him on writing it. “I knew that we needed stories upon stories. Every item that gets repaired comes with a story.”
The volume that they created, Repair Revolution: How Fixers Are Transforming Our Throwaway Culture, was just published in October by New World Library. Together they designed and distributed a questionnaire to repair coaches and Café organizers across the US and beyond, eliciting their stories about their local projects, what approaches work best and what people get out of the experience.
Surprisingly, it turns out that the operative word here is not so much “fixed” or “free” as “fun.” Repair Cafés are interactive social events, designed to heal divisions in communities as much as to fix beloved-but-broken possessions. Participants come from all quadrants of the sociopolitical, ethnic and religious spectrum. Even in places where the organizer isn’t an internationally recognized tea expert, there are always tables with free coffee, tea and baked goods and places for attendees to sit and enjoy them while schmoozing with their neighbors. “You can see it happening in front of your face: a community being woven together at a Repair Café,” says Knight. “It bridges every kind of divide – people who would never have come together otherwise.”
While the repair coaches trend toward retirement age, younger people, some contemplating careers in STEM fields, often sit beside them to observe and learn while they work. One remarkable thing that organizers have discovered is that people on the autism spectrum tend to feel quite at home at these events, becoming deeply absorbed in the repair process. Even small children get to participate, at a Kids’ Take-It-Apart Table covered with objects that have outlasted their useful life.
The bringers of broken objects learn a lot as well. A Repair Café is not a dropoff service; the owner seeking assistance is expected to interact with the coach throughout the process, explaining what’s wrong and then discovering how to make it right next time. The preservation and transfer of skills and knowledge are an important part of the movement’s raison d’etre. So is a desire to save the planet by reducing humanity’s carbon footprint, naturally.
Most of the accounts of the experiences of coaches and users are Knight’s writing, but the transitions between them and Wackman’s parts of the book are admirably seamless. He paints the big picture of the movement, its history and philosophy, grounding it in larger cultural trends and deeper sources such as the Hebrew precept Tikkun Olam (“heal the world”) and the Zen practice of appreciating imperfection known as wabi-sabi.
In attempting to explain why the Hudson Valley has proven such fertile ground for Repair Cafés, Wackman reminds the reader of the region’s heritage as the cradle of the American environmental movement, citing the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater’s successful 50-year campaign to “repair” a broken river. Looking toward the future, he also talks about the recent breakdown of world markets to purchase recyclable materials, which has reinforced the sustainability movement’s insistence that recycling is only the last of many steps that can be taken to reduce consumption and waste. Repair and reuse, they say, should be much more of a focus if we want to leave a better world for our descendants.
The onset of Covid-19 has put Repair Cafés on pause since March, although a few small-scale open-air gatherings began to happen again in September and October. According to Knight, libraries – enthusiastic boosters of the repair trend – are helping refer owners of dysfunctional items to local experts who are willing to have a look at them, with handoffs often happening in their parking lots. Local and national repair movement networks have been conducting Zoom sessions in which coaches talk owners through the process of diagnosing and fixing their own problematic possessions.
John Wackman thinks that all this enforced downtime presents a good opportunity for people who would like to have Repair Cafés in their own communities to lay the groundwork, recruit coaches and identify host spaces. Much of the intent of this book is to guide would-be organizers step-by-step through the process, informed by the experiences of those who pioneered the movement. There are sections (written by coaches) on how to do simple repairs and what tools and supplies to keep on hand, as well as how to structure your local group and organize the events. Links to online resources are plentiful as well.
Repair Revolution: How Fixers Are Transforming Our Throwaway Culture (New World Library, ISBN# 9781608686605, trade paperback, 320 pages, $18.95) is available at many local bookstores, including Inquiring Minds in New Paltz and Saugerties, Rough Draft in Kingston, Postmark in Rosendale, The Golden Notebook in Woodstock and Oblong Books and Music in Rhinebeck and Millerton. It can also be ordered via the usual online sources – although, as proponents of sustainability, the authors prefer to steer purchasers away from the industry giants and toward https://bookshop.org, which funnels some of its profits back to independent bookstores.
To learn more about the Repair Café movement locally, visit https://repaircafehv.org; nationally, visit https://repaircafe.org.
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