Stanford Free Library to host Repair Cafe

STANFORD — A Repair Cafe will bring experienced fixers to the Stanford Free Library on July 18, offering free repairs for items ranging from lamps to jewelry to electronics.

The Repair Cafe is set for 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. in the community room in the Stanford Free Library on Route 82.

Suzie Fromer, coordinator of the Repair Cafe Hudson Valley network, said the events serve two purposes: keeping usable items out of landfills, and helping people rediscover the value of what they already own.

“On the one hand, yes we want to save things from the landfill and remind people that they can fix things instead of just tossing them,” Fromer said. “But at this point, people are also really understanding the value of things and the importance of saving money instead of buying something new.”

Just as central to the mission, Fromer said, is building community. Rather than the event being a drop-off service, repair cafes are a social space where attendees sit alongside volunteers and neighbors as they learn to tinker with their broken items.

Volunteer repair coaches at the event are equipped to provide services on a range of items, such as fixing small broken appliances, sewing clothing and textile repairs, sharpening dull tools and rewiring lamps.

For Riva Weinstein, a volunteer who repairs jewelry at the cafes, fixing something doesn’t necessarily mean restoring it to its original form.

“What does fixing something mean? It doesn’t necessarily mean making it what it was,” Weinstein said. “It sometimes means opening yourself to the idea of creating something else out of it.”

That openness, Fromer said, is where the real reward lies. She recalled repairing jewelry for people who no longer had the fine motor skills or close vision to do it themselves, including one woman with arthritis whose bracelet had sat broken on a table for two or three years.

After Fromer had fit the bracelet’s clasp with a magnet, so the woman could fasten it herself, the woman cried.
“What we all do is easy for us,” Fromer said. “But, when I look around the room, what everyone else is doing isn’t easy for me. It’s an amazing talent pool.”