What Is It?¶

Repair Café is an international project to reduce waste by bringing people together to fix broken items for free. The current social norm when items are damaged is to throw them away and purchase new ones. This puts people under financial strain and contributes to excessive waste, particularly when items are only slightly damaged—for example, when a fuse blows in a stereo. Repair Café’s goal is to bring together people with technical skills, “fixers,” and people who need repairs. It is both a social and working space, offering apprenticeships to those interested in learning skills of their own and providing a community for fixers who return time after time to volunteer their skills.

For the past several years, the Stanford branch of Engineers for a Sustainable World has collaborated with the non-profit organization Repair Café to offer free repair events to students and members of the Stanford community. The founder of Repair Cafe, Martine Postma, organized the very first Repair Cafe in Amsterdam on October 8th, 2009 in order to teach people about the value of repairing and kindle their enthusiasm for a sustainable society. Since then, the organization has grown vastly and now includes over 1,500 Repair Cafes worldwide, including our own here at Stanford.

The Stanford branch of ESW was founded in 2003 and since then has organized numerous activities, including workshops, international internships, local projects and conferences. In addition to international projects, such as robotic exploration in Peru and remote monitoring systems design in Indonesia, there are also several local projects, including the Repair Cafe, which began in April of 2016. Through the event, engineering students can gain invaluable hands-on experiences that aren’t available in class while also helping divert around 60 items each school quarter from being thrown away, making this event both a service and a learning experience.

The ESW chapter at Stanford found that there was a particular need for Repair Café on our campus. College students often lack the funds to take care of essential possessions and can struggle greatly when such possessions are damaged. There is a Repair Café close by in Palo Alto, but for students without sufficient transportation, even this distance can be too much—especially for those with damaged bikes. Repair Café also falls neatly within ESW Stanford’s mission to address both poverty and sustainability, with the additional benefit of providing potential educational opportunities for engineering students on campus.

At Stanford, the main form of transportation is bikes, which leads to a lot of bike repairs!

ESW Stanford hosts Repair Café once a quarter, or about once every ten weeks, for one four- or five-hour day. We recruit fixers from the community - some are students, but the majority are other community members. Fixers are separated into three main categories: bikes, appliances, and sewing. This is a significant difference from other Repair Café events. Repair Café Palo Alto, for instance, sees many lamps, vacuums, and related items, whereas Repair Café at Stanford has a much bigger need for bike repairs.

In fact, the need for bike repairs is so significant that we host workshops to train ESW members to fix bikes to handle the demand. Collaborating with the Stanford Bike Project, ESW teaches the basics of bike maintenance, including brake repair and tube replacement, to its members and any other interested students. These students usually go on to be bike fixers at the event itself. ESW also connects interested students with other fixers in the apprenticeship program. Fixers get to have an extra pair of hands, and students get to learn and practice hands-on repair skills that often translate to class or work projects.

The event itself is long and busy, but highly rewarding. ESW members set up the space with designated areas for each fixer, providing tools, materials, and food as needed. Many fixers bring their own set of tools. Stanford students and other community members come in throughout the day with items in various states of disrepair. They are met at the door by ESW members who assess the item and its damage and assign it to a fixer in the appropriate category. The fixer (along with their apprentice, if they have one) works to fix the item. If the fix is not possible, we recycle the item as best we can, sometimes stripping it for parts if its owner agrees. We also have ESW members on hand during the day to make runs to hardware stores as materials run low. Repair Café is so popular that we sometimes have fixers volunteering to stay long past the end of the event to finish. The event hinges largely upon the enthusiastic support of our volunteer fixers, who consistently show dedication far beyond any of our expectations.

Students can learn to fix all sorts of appliances from iPhones to fridges

Our local seamstress teaches new apprentices every quarter basic sewing skills