SCHENECTADY REPAIR CAFE
Repair Café is a neighborhood initiative that promotes repair as an alternative to tossing things out. At a Repair Café, anyone can bring their broken but cherished items to be fixed on the spot, for FREE, with the help of volunteer repair coaches. Limit of 2 items per household.
We will have some new additions to our family of repair coaches for April 6th.
A) We have some new tech wizards so let’s start with what I’d like to call the TECH TIPS & TRICKS table...
1) They will be all together at one table with the general repair guys. Steve Tomaszewski has agreed to be the lead repair person for this. Steve is one of our most experienced veteran repair coaches.
2) We have High School students who have agreed to try on the role of "Teen Tech Tutor". This'll be great news for all of us senior citizens with smart phones and other gadgets that are just a bit TOO smart for us...
3) We also have a computer expert who can help folks with virus removal and getting rid of spam and junk so their devices run faster. He will bring the software & tools we have previously lacked to accomplish this. Hopefully our patrons will be able to learn some self-help skills and they will be safer and more secure in the scary digital world we live in today.
B) We’ve gained a talented doll restoration & repair coach as well. She will be able to repair and restore a wide variety of dolls for folks. She coordinates the Daija’s Doll Room ministry at Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church in Schenectady.
1) She (and other volunteers) restore previously owned dolls and redistribute them to kids in foster care.
2) She has been doing doll restoration -mostly American Girl dolls - including cleaning, hair restoration, re-wigging, restringing for approximately 3 years.
3) There are, of course, repairs she has not done or cannot do - cracked porcelain doll heads for example. But she is willing to share any knowledge for those repairs that she can and she is not afraid to do problem solving....to see some of the great work she has done – take a look through the photos and videos on the Daija’s Doll Facebook page. https://m.facebook.com/daijasdoll/
C) We now have a formal collaboration established between us and the Electric City Bike Rescue group.
1) We share a common goal in that we strongly believe in recycling and community service. Most importantly, we strongly advocate teaching people so they can be self-reliant.
2) We don't have the expertise to repair every bicycle problem, nor do we have the superb facility or the amazing assortment of materials. Rather than turning people away empty-handed we are going to direct them to the ECBR workshop where expert help is available for free every week. They even have a lot of rescued bicycles rebuilt and ready to be given away.
3) One of our members recently joined up with them and now belongs to both organizations. He has agreed to be the liaison between our groups.
Bring the family! Explore how things work at our supervised Kids Take-Apart Table!
Coffee and refreshments will be served.
Do you have questions about what kind of items you can bring for repair? Or would you like to offer your skills to repair things for your neighbors?
Contact Dave West