Prefigurative Community Building (Part 9)
Fixing Together: Repair Cafés as Collective Care and Power With in Action
In a society obsessed with disposability of products, people, and entire ecosystems, repair becomes a radical act. Not just mending what’s broken, but restoring our capacity to care, to share, and to make skillfulness a communal resource instead of a private asset.
Repair Cafés and Fix-it Clinics are not businesses, nonprofits, or services. They are spaces of mutual learning, where neighbors bring broken things, appliances, electronics, clothes, and sit beside volunteers to try and fix them together.
More than anything, these gatherings stitch Power With into the fabric of daily life: collaborative, anti-authoritarian, abundant with skill circulation, and rooted in trust. They subvert Power Over by decentralizing knowledge, refusing profit motives, and valuing interdependence over expertise.
Why Repair Cafés Matter
Keep items out of the landfill while reducing the need for new purchases.
Democratize skill-sharing, where no one is “the expert,” and everyone can learn.
Create public space for learning, dialogue, and practical cooperation.
Undo learned helplessness, especially in communities targeted by planned obsolescence.
Model mutual aid through tangible, joyful action.
A broken toaster can become a moment of transformation. For the object. For the people. For the culture around them.
How to Start a Repair Café Using Power With Coordination
This isn’t a franchise. You don’t need a license. Just shared intent, space, and willingness to try.
1. Gather a Circle, Not a Board
Invite a few folks who are interested in:
Electronics, sewing, mechanical repair
Mutual aid, degrowth, climate justice
Community skill-building
From the start, make it clear: no one is in charge. Everyone is a co-steward. You’re co-creating a pattern of care, not a service to be delivered.
💡 Tip: Use affinity groups, not roles. Let people gravitate toward what they enjoy; tool sourcing, outreach, logistics, hosting, documenting.
2. Pick a Space That Welcomes Mess and Connection
Repair Cafés need a bit of room, a few tables, and the freedom to spread out. You can use:
Community centers
Libraries
Church basements
Hackerspaces
Co-op houses or even garages
Make sure the space:
Is physically accessible
Doesn’t require expensive permits or contracts
Feels casual, not clinical
Resource: Mutual Aid Space Design Principles (Beautiful Trouble)
3. Start with What You Have
Don’t wait for funding or perfect toolkits. Invite people to bring:
Broken things they care about
Basic repair tools
Curiosity and patience
You’ll be amazed how quickly a few screwdrivers, a soldering iron, and some thread can catalyze a shared ecosystem of fixing.
4. Focus on Learning, Not Efficiency
Repair Cafés are not free repair shops. They’re co-learning events. Every fix becomes an invitation to:
Teach as you do
Ask questions without shame
Document wins and failures openly
Avoid expertism or performance. Nobody gets graded. Everyone is welcome to try.
5. Build the Culture, Not the Brand
Avoid building a centralized identity or rigid structure. Instead:
Let each gathering be co-hosted by whoever shows up
Rotate responsibilities
Encourage autonomy, others can replicate the idea freely
Think pattern replication, not institutionalization.
Resource: The Repair Café Foundation Starter Kit (Netherlands)
While it comes from a formal foundation, you don’t need to register or follow their branding to benefit from the starter materials.
6. Center Accessibility and Consent
Make sure your gathering honors diverse needs:
Provide signage, tool explanations, and work surfaces at various heights
Use plain language
Ask before touching or taking over someone’s item
Offer trauma-informed hospitality
A space that centers relational safety invites wider participation.
7. Tell the Story Publicly, But Stay Decentralized
Document your sessions through photos, zines, or social media. Share your methods. Host open planning meetings. Welcome others to start their own gatherings nearby.
Encourage replication without control.
Resource: Fixit Clinic DIY Organizer Resources – practical guides, signage templates, and checklists to help launch decentralized Fixit events anywhere.
Real-Life Examples of Repair Cafés in Action
Fixit Clinic (USA, Decentralized)
Fixit Clinic began as a traveling mutual repair event and now supports local organizers around the country. Their model is explicitly educational and anti-authoritarian, with tools for replication and no central control.
The Restart Project (UK)
Focused on electronics repair, Restart organizes pop-up repair events, skill-sharing sessions, and advocacy around the Right to Repair. They combine technical education with participatory event design.
A Place to Repair More Than Objects
Repair Cafés are also places to repair:
Relationship with failure
Isolation from skill
Dependency on extractive systems
They are spaces of collective sovereignty, where we reclaim the right to touch, learn, care for, and mend what breaks, in our tools and in each other.
Optional Note for Facilitators
If you are hosting in a space that requires it, consider adding this at the door or in your materials:
Disclaimer: This is a participatory event, not a professional repair service. All repair is done collaboratively and at your own risk. The goal is to learn together and extend the life of items, not to guarantee outcomes.
Final Thoughts
To fix something is to believe it’s worth keeping. A community that gathers to repair together is practicing something even more radical: a world where nothing and no one is disposable. That’s Power With in its most grounded form.
But the brokenness we’re facing isn’t just in frayed power cords or torn seams, it lives in the threads between us. Generations of individualism, extraction, and competition have worn holes in the social fabric. Trust has unraveled. Skills have been siloed. Communities have been fractured along the fault lines of race, class, gender, and ability.
Repair spaces don’t just mend physical things, they offer us a place to practice social stitching: sitting with strangers, asking for help, making mistakes in public, and offering what we know without hoarding it. These are quiet revolutions. Each interaction is a tiny suture holding together a patch of communal belonging that capitalism tried to cut apart.
When someone fixes a neighbor’s lamp while explaining how it works, they’re not just extending the life of an object, they’re extending a kind of relationship rarely found in transactional culture. When someone says “I don’t know, let’s try it together,” it disrupts the myth that value comes only from certainty or expertise. These moments reprogram how we relate to power, from dominance and extraction toward co-creation and care.
In this way, a Repair Café becomes a weaving ground. It becomes a place where threads of skill, generosity, patience, and vulnerability are bound together in a living, relational pattern. These threads, unlike wires or zippers, are never fixed once and for all. They fray and need tending. But the act of tending becomes the culture itself.
Let’s build more spaces like this. One broken blender at a time. One mended connection at a time.