Neighbors With Fix-It Skills Give Free Help At Repair Cafe

NEW CITY, NY – The ability to fix or repair items is a vanishing art. Repair Café aims to bring it back, by pairing the time and talent of locals with fixer skills with folks who need help or who want to learn how to fix that coffee machine or mend a broken clasp on a bracelet.

The international, inter-generational, community-collaborative movement fascinated Rockland County officials, who see all kinds of good in keeping household items out of the waste stream by repairing them instead.

"We increasingly are becoming a "throw away" society, one in which so many of our possessions are replaced at the first sign of a glitch," County Executive Ed Day said. "Preserving repair know-how skills by passing them on to the younger generation is critical to Rockland’s shared future.”

Rockland held its first Repair Cafe in May and its second Nov. 10.

The fall event at North Rockland High School paired volunteer "Repair Coaches" (neighbors with fix-it expertise) with people who brought in items to be fixed such as lamps, jewelry, computers, chairs, vacuums, toasters and other small appliances, clothing, frames, wooden items, toys and electronics.

Seeking help, 139 Rockland residents attended, bringing on average two items to be repaired. That’s almost 280 repairs in four hours.

The Executive Director of the Rockland County Solid Waste Management Authority, Anna Roppolo, said the Repair Cafe was, “another great community building event utilizing our partnerships with other like-minded volunteers, organizations and North Rockland High School student volunteers! Just think if all of those items went unrepaired - they would have ended up in a landfill over 300 miles from Rockland. This event reinforced and supports the Authority’s reduction and reuse efforts, partnerships, commitment to the environment and continual education of our residents.”

Rockland County Solid Waste Management Authority sponsored the community event along with the Rockland Conservation & Service Corps (a program of the Rockland County Youth Bureau), and North Rockland Central School District.

“The benefits of this partnership are extensive and transformational; preserving repair know-how skills by passing them on to the younger generation is critical to Rockland’s shared future,” said Day. “I am thrilled that so many of you joined in this important initiative because only by working together, fostering a true sense of community, can we complete the renaissance that we have begun in this county.”

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