Prefigurative Community Building (Part 10)
Building Power With: Starting a Community Makerspace for Resilience and Repair
In a time when planned obsolescence is the norm and corporate design keeps us dependent, the act of fixing, building, and making together is a radical form of resistance. Makerspaces and repair labs, once the domain of tech startups and hobbyists, can be transformed into grassroots hubs for autonomy, shared knowledge, and communal care. When organized through Power With rather than Power Over, these spaces become more than workshops. They become seeds of post-capitalist infrastructure.
This essay outlines how to start a community-powered makerspace or repair hub that fosters local resilience and solidarity. It offers a step-by-step guide, practical tools, and examples of existing projects doing this work in ways that center equity, access, and sustainability.
Why Makerspaces?
A makerspace is a shared, often open-access workshop where people can use tools and materials for projects in woodworking, electronics, textiles, 3D printing, and more. A repair lab, similarly, is a space where broken items are restored and brought back to life with collective skill. Both can serve as civic infrastructure for community autonomy, but only if organized in a way that rejects hierarchy, profit extraction, and gatekeeping.
Instead of feeding the startup pipeline or tech-elite culture, we can reimagine these spaces as:
Mutual learning environments
Redistribution points for tools and skills
Repair clinics that fight throwaway culture
Solidarity workshops for mutual aid infrastructure
Gathering points for creative resistance and skill liberation
Step-by-Step Guide to Starting a Power With Makerspace
1. Start with Listening, Not Leading
Gather interested folks in your neighborhood. Host a potluck or open discussion in a local park, library, or someone's home. Ask questions like:
What skills do people want to share or learn?
What kinds of tools or space do they need access to?
What barriers have kept them from participating in these kinds of spaces before?
Document everything. This is your base.
Avoid Power Over by: resisting the urge to define the space alone. Power With starts by letting the needs and capacities of the group shape the vision.
2. Find or Share a Space
You don't need a fancy building to begin. Start small:
Use a garage, basement, or shared community room
Partner with a church, school, or library that has underutilized space
Organize pop-up “Fix It Fairs” in parks or public plazas
Consider accessibility from the beginning: mobility access, transportation, and safety.
3. Create a Horizontal Organizing Structure
Use models that emphasize shared ownership and collective governance, such as:
Consensus-based decision making
Sociocracy or modified circle models
Rotating facilitation and transparent responsibilities
Create working groups: tools and safety, programming, accessibility, outreach, etc. Let people join based on capacity and interest—not credentials.
📚 Helpful resource: The Sociocracy for All Toolkit
4. Collect Tools and Materials Through Community Reclamation
Instead of buying expensive equipment, gather what already exists:
Host tool donation drives
Repair and refurbish old items
Collaborate with local repair shops, junkyards, or schools
Start with hand tools and low-tech projects. Think sewing machines, soldering irons, drills, bikes, not just 3D printers and laser cutters.
Avoid Power Over by: avoiding corporate sponsorships or tech-evangelism that demands a particular identity or agenda for the space.
5. Build a Culture of Skill-Sharing, Not Expertism
Offer regular open workshops taught by volunteers or community members. Make it easy to say "I don't know yet" and safe to ask for help. Create multilingual signage and guides, use visual instruction when possible, and normalize co-learning.
Avoid Power Over by: refusing the hierarchy of experts vs learners. Everyone teaches. Everyone learns.
6. Make Repair and Reuse Central
Orient the space toward sustainability, not production. Host recurring Repair Cafés where people can bring in broken electronics, appliances, clothes, or bikes and get help fixing them.
Document repair processes to build a local “Repair Wiki”
Celebrate “Fix of the Month” stories in a community zine
📚 Helpful resource: Repair Café Foundation
7. Build Relational Infrastructure
Share meals. Laugh. Celebrate birthdays. Clean up together. Tend conflict when it arises with care and transparency. These are the invisible threads of strong coordination.
Two Real-Life Examples
FIXIT Clinic (USA & Global)
An open repair initiative hosting pop-up events across libraries, schools, and community centers where participants bring in broken items and learn how to fix them with volunteer coaches. The emphasis is on learning and sustainability, not service provision.
🔗 https://fixitclinic.blogspot.com/
Repaired Futures (UK)
A worker-coop-led repair lab and makerspace focused on climate justice, refugee skill-building, and e-waste reduction. Operates on cooperative governance, community input, and a “train the trainer” model to seed repair skills in underserved communities.
🔗 https://www.repaircafewales.org/
(partner org with similar approach)
The Power of Making Together
When people come together to repair instead of replace, to learn instead of buy, and to build instead of wait, they reclaim power. But it’s not the power of dominance or control. It’s Power With, a force made of relationship, reciprocity, and the shared refusal to let extractive systems define our worth or our possibilities.
Through the act of making together, something more than tools or objects is produced. A relational field forms, one where trust is practiced through borrowed tools, where attention flows through the rhythm of shared tasks, and where dignity is restored not through charity, but through co-creation. Power emerges here not as a possession, but as a consequence of interdependence. In each collaborative repair, in each exchange of knowledge, in each moment of mutual problem-solving, a web of generative capacity begins to take shape. This is the kind of power that cannot be hoarded or centralized. It only exists in motion, sustained by connection.
This is how we decapitalize our lives. This is how we begin again.