October 20th, 2023
Community Spotlight Blog by Nicole Ortiz, Master Composter-Master Recycler Volunteer
Interviewee: Suzie Fromer, Café Coordinator, Repair Café
The Recycling Outreach Team’s “Community Spotlight” initiative highlights local stories about waste-sustainability. This month we sat down with Suzie Fromer, café coordinator at Repair Café, to discuss her involvement with the organization, how it’s been received by the community, and some of the more unique experiences and items she’s seen. A Repair Café is a free community event where you bring “broken but beloved items ” to volunteer repair coaches who help teach you how to fix them. Each Repair Cafe event may have a broad list of items they can troubleshoot and repair, depending on the specialty of the local volunteer Repair Coaches. Some common items accepted at Repair Cafes may include (but not limited to) Chairs, Clocks, Clothing and Textiles, Digital Devices, Dolls. Electrical Items, Frames, Jewelry and Watches, Other Mechanical Items, Other Wooden Items, Small Appliances, Stuffed Animals, Tools in need of sharpening, Toys. Upcoming events may be listed on the Repair Cafe Hudson Valley website. If you enjoy this blog, or know someone who might, please consider sharing this story!
How did you find yourself working with the Repair Cafe?
While I was growing up, my parents owned an antique shop in Maryland. My father specialized in restoring antique furniture and woodworking tools and I used to go with my parents to antique shows almost every weekend. I used to buy and upcycle vintage costume jewelry before that was a thing! I went on to learn metal smithing in college when I worked at their Student Jewelry Workshop for my work-study job.
Jewelry had only been a hobby, and after college I worked in film production, publications and PR before returning to jewelry-making a few years ago. In 2019, I saw a Facebook post for repair coaches at a newly formed Repair Café, and I reached out about volunteering for jewelry repairs. I loved it and found I was more skilled than I realized and continued to volunteer at every event! I actually went online to www.repaircavehv.org just to see if there were more cafes in the area I could volunteer at and saw a job posting for the coordinator position, and now I’ve been there over a year!
RCHV was founded 10 years ago by John Wackman; unfortunately, he passed away a few years ago. Our fiscal sponsor, Sustainable Hudson Valley, held the network together until they could get together funding for a new coordinator, and I was just fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. It truly is an honor to continue John’s work, and I feel a tremendous responsibility to nurture this network he founded.
John Wackman
Editor’s Note by Angelina Brandt: John was a visionary for sustainable materials management to all who knew him for his positivity, vision, and care for the right to repair. John was the founding “coordinator, communicator and cheerleader” for Repair Cafe Hudson Valley. He organized the first Repair Cafe in New York State in New Paltz in 2013, which was only the fourth in the nation at that time. As a result of John’s endless volunteer time and leadership, Repair Cafe grew to over 40 communities in 10 counties in the Hudson Valley, the Catskills, and Capital region. In October 2020, just ten weeks before his untimely passing, John published his book “Repair Revolution: How Fixers Are Transforming Our Throwaway Culture”. AMong his many awards and distinguished accomplishments, John posthumously received a Leadership Award from the New York State Association of Reduction, Reuse, and Recycling for his lifetime achievement.
How does the organization work, and how has it been received by the local community?
In Ulster County, there are currently seven active repair cafes, and everyone is always welcome at any café, and many travel to neighboring counties to go to a cafe. I serve as a central point of contact for the organizers and the public, but each cafe is independently run and everyone, except for me, is a volunteer.
We all work together behind the scenes to problem solve and share resources, and many of our fixers go to cafes every weekend so there’s a lot of connectivity, but each cafe is truly independent. Repair Cafes have been very well received by the Hudson Valley, and the increase in the number of them reflects that enthusiasm, both from the organizers who put on the cafes and our guests who bring their beloved but broken items for us to fix—for free! We now have over 50 cafes throughout the Hudson Valley, Catskills and Capital Region!
In what ways is Repair Cafe growing in the near future? What upcoming locations can we expect to see?
Just in the year I’ve been here I’ve seen a big uptick in the number of locations and the total number of cafes held, but a lot of that is due to people finally figuring out how to live with Covid still kicking around. Some locations are still making their reentry now and others will return, hopefully next year. It’s very exciting to get emails from new towns interested in starting a cafe—I never know what location is going to reach out next! I don’t have anything new anticipated in Ulster right now as it’s a really well-established network, but there’s been a lot of growth in Orange County to the south, Montgomery is back, Highland Falls returns Oct. 21, and there are new cafes in Port Jervis and Woodbury. Next up there is hopefully a new cafe coming to Goshen.
What are some unique skills you’ve seen exercised at Repair Cafes?
Clock repair is one of our more specialized skills—we are lucky to have a few horologists in our network and some other highly skilled, self-taught tinkerers who can work on clocks. Darning, or knit repair, is something I’ve seen some of our textile repair coaches do, and that is another skill that is in danger of becoming a lost art. Some cafes have location-specific specialties: I’m heading to Livingston Manor’s cafe in Sullivan County soon, and they’re hosted at the Catskill Fly Fishing Center and Museum and offer fly fishing gear repair!
What interesting repair skills have you learned from working with Repair Cafe?
I like to say that repair cafe work is like an Emergency Room, while repair work in your home workshop is more like an Operating Room. You never know what’s going to come in, which is a lot of the fun for the fixers.
We bring a lot of tools and a lot of supplies, but there’s inevitably something we don’t have with us, so we often have to improvise. Once in a while I’ll think about a repair a few days later and come up with a better solution than I did at the time, and try to remember that approach for the next time. Learning to think critically and come up with a solution quickly with what you have on hand is something I’ve now mastered.
I was thrilled to get an impromptu pearl knotting lesson from one of our really experienced jewelry fixers a few weeks ago. I know how to pearl knot, but find it takes too long to do at a cafe, but this fixer had done repair work for Chanel for 30 years and had a method that would speed it up. I still need to practice, but that would be a great thing to be able to do at a café, and I rarely do it because if there’s a line at my station it’s just too long a fix to do.
What advice do you have for people looking to get involved?
Don’t be afraid that you’re not experienced enough. You can always assist a more experienced fixer, and we all learn by doing at a Repair Café—it truly is its very own art form. And even if you’re not handy, we always need volunteers to just keep the cafe running smoothly either at the check-in table or by checking with the fixers to see what the timeframe of a fix is and when they could take the next guest. And as everything is donated or comes out of our pockets, we also always appreciate bakers and home cooks who can bring snacks for the fixers and guests. The Repair Cafe concept is all about making everyone feel welcome by offering hospitality—the coffee, tea and snacks are part of that.
How else are you spreading the word about the Repair Cafe mission?
We’ve been really fortunate in how supported we’ve been by local news sources and organizations (like this one!) happy to help us spread the word. We’ve been on a lot of local radio stations and featured in local papers, which is a great way to reach people. I also run the @repaircafehudsonvalley Facebook and Instagram, send out a monthly newsletter to guests who sign up to receive our monthly calendar and keep our website www.repaircafehv.org up to date regarding upcoming cafes.
For HV Climate Solutions Week I ran a “How to Start a Repair Café” Zoom with several other Cafe organizers from around the country, which is now up on our new YouTube channel. I also am always on the look to pitch a story about Repair Cafes—people are desperate for some positive environmental news right now, so this movement gets a lot of press, which helps it grow.
The whole movement in the Hudson Valley came about because our founder, John Wackman, saw an article in The New York Times about a Repair Cafe in Amsterdam. His enthusiasm and passion for repair has spawned 53 cafes in our region, plus the whole network of New Jersey cafes now called Garden State Repair Cafe—so far!
What have been some of the most rewarding experiences you’ve had with the organization??
We had the unparalleled opportunity this past April to be featured on the Today Show during their Earth Week coverage—we set up a pop-up Repair Cafe on Rockefeller Plaza! It was a lot of work to organize: We brought together fixers and organizers from all corners of our network, many of whom had worked together virtually but never met, and we sourced items to bring with us to fix. And then we heard from Martine Postma, the founder of the Repair Cafe movement in Amsterdam, that so many people went to the international group’s website after the segment aired they crashed the website! But I had probably the most rewarding experience just last week. I was on Radio Kingston along with Melissa Iachetta, the Kingston Repair Cafe organizer, discussing all things Repair Cafe including their upcoming cafe on Oct. 28. One of our fixers emailed me later that he had listened to the whole segment and that I had really communicated the spirit of Repair Cafe and that John would have been proud. That made my year!
