If It’s Broke, Fix It: Repair Cafes Make Your Tech, Appliances Last Longer

**Sasha-Ann Simons** (0:12)
Hey Chicago, I'm Sasha-Ann Simons, and this is In the Loop.
Stick around to the very end of the episode to get a rundown of the latest news. But first, we've all been there. Your laptop suddenly won't turn on. The zipper on your favorite jacket gets stuck, or the old toaster that you picked up at a garage sale gives up. I'm sure I can speak for many of us when I say we'd probably toss it and buy something new. But what if you could fix it instead, for free?
Across the Chicago area, repair cafes are bringing folks together volunteers who know how to breathe life into broken household items. It's part of a growing movement pushing back against our throwaway culture. In this episode of the pod, we'll learn how these events work and hear why they're catching on. At the table was Maria Anna Rafac, campus sustainability coordinator at Joliet Junior College, Elyse Hoffenberg, who's a clerk with the Township of Lions, and Amy Yee, economy and business reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. We started with the women behind the repair cafes, telling us how they got it off the ground. Maria went first.

**Maria Anna Rafac** (1:25)
I'm blessed to have some amazing students. And we had a student, Ashley Clinder, and she said she had heard about this new movement online. And there was a repair cafe in Oak Park, the first in Illinois. So she went up there for a weekend, went to their repair cafe and came back and said, we have got to do this. So we hosted one of it. Oak Park actually came and helped us.

**Sasha-Ann Simons** (1:48)
Oh, cool.

**Maria Anna Rafac** (1:49)
Shout out to Max. And then we started our own. We became an official repair cafe the next year.

**Sasha-Ann Simons** (1:55)
Awesome. Elyse, what was your origin story?

**Elyse Hoffenberg** (1:58)
Well, we are really committed to sustainability at the Township of Lions. And I attended a Go Green LaGrange meeting three and a half years ago. And they were tossing around the idea of creating a repair cafe, something I had never heard of before.
We were heading into the summer and we have this amazing internship program where students between the ages of 16 and 24 come in and they learn leadership skills. Well, that summer, I said, hey guys, let's build a repair cafe. So these three college and high school students, they put together the foundation, they found volunteers, they got donations from local hardware stores.

**Sasha-Ann Simons** (2:37)
I love that.

**Elyse Hoffenberg** (2:38)
Yes. And three and a half, nearly years later, we are just a bustling, monthly, amazing repair cafe that kind of redeems my belief in society.

**Sasha-Ann Simons** (2:48)
And were you seeing, Maria, like was there a need that you were seeing that you needed to fill? Like what made you really want to take it from, oh, this is a cool idea that they're doing an Oak Park to, we got to start these events too.

**Maria Anna Rafac** (2:59)
I think it was the first event. I think we hosted an event called Busted to Beautiful.
And like I said, the Oak Park folks came. And we had one young man who showed up with a duffel bag. And we fixed his whole wardrobe. But the best part of the story was about three shirts in, she takes them around the other side of the table and taught him how to put buttons on. And then he was helping repair shirts that were coming out. And that transfer of knowledge and kind of watching that interaction between different age groups, that was kind of like, I think we're on to something here.

**Sasha-Ann Simons** (3:41)
Now, Amy, you've been writing about this stuff for the Sun-Times, you've written about upcycling, about a repair fair at the Chicago Tool Library, a reverse Black Friday Market in North Center. Talk about the reasons you're hearing from folks that you're speaking with about why they attend these types of events.

**Amy Yee** (3:57)
Yeah, so last year I attended a repair fair at the Chicago Tool Library, it's in West Garfield Park. I highly recommend this as a resource to people. You can borrow tools and equipment for free. But they have periodic repair fairs where their huge space is filled with different stations where people can just come in and bring their items that need repair. So there's like an electronics corner, there could be like a sewing corner.
You know, I was amazed at, you know, the people who were there from all walks of life, all over the city. And then the people who were repairing things, I mean, sometimes they just love, for example, sewing or knitting, and I can't do that, but they have a special knack for it, and they really like it, and they're really good at it. And then in the electronics corner, I do remember people were bringing in all kinds of things, like fans and, you know, there was actually a pachinko machine that someone brought in. And these, the people who were repairing them, they are often engineers, like trained engineers. They might be like teachers, or, you know, there was actually a trained physicist who works at a lab at University of Chicago who was there volunteering his time.