Colorado church Repair Café mends items and a throw-away mindset

Unraveling wicker chairs, dull gardening shears, and broken necklaces are all items that routinely end up in landfills – a reality that folks from three churches in the Denver area set out to change by organizing a Helping Hands Repair Café.

The event, held at First Plymouth United Church of Christ on April 26, invited people in the broader community to bring all kinds of broken and worn things for repair. It was a joint effort organized by a team of six congregants from First Plymouth, Kirk of Bonnie Brae UCC, and Most Precious Blood Catholic Church.

“Our main goal was keeping stuff out of landfills that could be repaired and helping people to do a mindset shift that we can repair and reuse items. The other main goal was building community. People were coming together, getting to know other people, sharing skills and interests,” said Ann Karlberg, one of the organizers from Kirk of Bonnie Brae. “We offered food and coffee as a way to welcome the community in.”

At the one-day event, 21 volunteer repair coaches assisted in stabilizing wobbly dining room chairs, mending cracked pottery, restoring small electrical appliances, patching holes in pants, sharpening knives, tuning bicycles, and fixing garden hoses. A children’s table offered activities, enabling parents to focus on their repairs.

Sharing skills

One person attended the Repair Cafe with hopes of reviving a 100-year-old teddy bear that held deep sentimental value.

“It was so worn and threadbare, and the sewer repaired the pads on its feet and paws very carefully, by hand, so that it wouldn’t tear the fabric,” Karlberg described.

A key part of the event was that those who brought items for repair stayed with and learned from the repair coaches while the work happened.

“It was especially fun listening to the dialogue between a coach and the person bringing something in,” said Pam Schmidt, who described how intently people were working together.

Schmidt and Jan McCoy co-lead First Plymouth’s Creation Justice Ministry, and both were instrumental in holding the Repair Café at their church, which typically hosts an Earth Day-related event each April.

As McCoy observed the repair coaches fixing and teaching, she noted the importance of recognizing and honoring the less-often considered skills that many people hold, particularly across generations.

“We had people fixing all kinds of electronic things, and there are skills like these that, in some ways, an entire generation has lost because if something was broken or torn, you gave it to Goodwill instead of sewing a patch. These are values that our parents, who lived through the Depression, tried to bestow on us, and maybe we didn’t do as good a job with the next generation. It was wonderful to see people who knew what they were doing and enjoyed teaching those of us who don’t,” she said.

The event organizers recruited the repair coaches from their congregations and neighborhoods. McCoy described the positive experience of having a 17-year-old high school student offering sewing repairs.

“People came out of the woodwork in our congregation with skills for repairing jewelry, lots of people who sew, a knife sharpener who was very busy – he sharpened around 60 knives,” Karlberg said.

When the repair coaches were not able to provide a fix on the spot, they still offered advice.

The day after at the Repair Café, at Most Precious Blood’s Mass, organizer Liz Dixon heard gratitude from a fellow congregant who had attended and left with several repaired items. She was excited about how much she had learned.

“While one of her items needed a new cord and couldn’t be fixed right there, the coach told her exactly what she needed to get, and it would be a simple repair. She couldn’t get over that. It was an exact example of the goals of building relationships, learning something, and salvaging from landfills,” Dixon commented.

Repairing a throw-away mindset

Repair Cafés have become a worldwide movement in recent years, with several popping up around the country, often offered by libraries, cities, and community groups. They are one piece of a broader effort to push back against consumerism, re-skill people for repair, and build community around sustainability in the process.

“Our Green Team tries to help people in the congregation to be more intentional about living with care for God’s creation. That motivates our whole team and is something the church values,” Karlberg said.

Dixon reflected on how the late Pope Francis challenged people to combat the “throw-away culture” that exists throughout the world.

“It’s important to find actions that show people what it is we can do – not just pray about it, but literally make some changes,” she said.

“With so much negative going on around us right now, the things being taken away, and more damage being done to the earth, this feels like a small footstep,” Schmidt said. “It’s something that we can do, and it’s something we’re doing as a team and spreading it out to other people.”

Repair revolution

Karlberg was inspired with the idea for holding a Repair Café when Kirk of Bonnie Brae UCC pastor, the Rev. Selena Wright, offered a sermon focused on “the right to repair.” Wright spoke about shifting to a mentality of valuing and repairing items, and also faith, relationships, and the world, Karlberg said.

The idea was met with great enthusiasm by the leaders of the three church’s environmental justice efforts

Both the sermon and event organizers drew guidance from the book Repair Revolution, which chronicles the rise of Repair Cafés, Fix-it Clinics, and volunteer-run organizations devoted to free community repairs.

For any group inspired to organize their own Repair Café, the Colorado organizers emphasized how much collaboration is key for planning, as well as bringing together people with a wide variety of skill-sets. They felt that four months was a good timeframe for organizing the one-day event, and they said that finding ways to advertise and get the word out was crucial.

“The most common question we heard is, ‘When are you going to do this again?’” McCoy said. The group hopes to make this an annual event that gets hosted in each of their church spaces.

Repairing community

At the start and end of the Helping Hands Repair Café, all of the volunteers and repair coaches gathered in the hall surrounded by tables filled with their tools for repair.

Before the event, they shared expectations for the gathering, and at the end, they reflected on the many experiences of restoring items together – over 60 repairs were made – with the people who brought and cared about them.

The small act of the circle was a reminder of how a group of people showed up – many who began as strangers to one another – and left with a greater sense of connection.

“It was a heartwarming, prayerful, gathering of community,” Schmidt said.

“Like Margaret Mead said, things only change when a small group of committed people work together to change them,” McCoy reflected. “Our communities are places where we can work with others who share the same environmental goals, and we can actually make change on the ground. That’s part of my faith.”

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