Kingston Repair Cafe at the Good Work Institute, part of the 2022 O+ Festival
WE ARE LOOKING FOR SKILLED AND KNOWLEDGABLE VOLUNTEERS TO BECOME REPAIR CAFE COACHES!
kingston
The Kingston Repair Cafe is co-organized by Melissa Iachetta and Jake Straus
Melissa Iachetta graduated from SUNY New Paltz with a B.A. in Geography and a minor in Environmental Studies. While in attendance she was the Campus Recycling Coordinator and Recycling Club President and organized large-scale events such as Reuse2Reduce, an end-of-year move-out program, which in her final year of managing, diverted three tons of material from the waste stream. After graduation, Melissa worked with RAMTeCH Software Solutions on-site for Central Hudson Gas and Electric in the Electric GIS department. She managed a team of 12 technicians in the United States (and a few more off-shore in India) as their Project Coordinator. While working in her Geography realm for the next 5 years, Melissa continued to follow her environmental passions on the side. She joined the Climate Smart Kingston Commission(CSKC) in 2018 and is now in her third term. Melissa works with fellow commissioners on programs, events, and initiatives to create a more sustainable Kingston, including leading Earth Month events, creating a pizza box campaign to educate Kingston residents that Pizza boxes are not recyclable in the city, and a "where do I..." brochure on recycling, reducing and rethinking. Melissa's work with CSKC connected her to the Hudson Valley Repair Cafe movement and in 2018 she began co-facilitating Kingston’s Repair Cafe. In this role, Melissa organizes and executes six free community events a year, keeps mailing list up to date, coordinates with coaches and volunteers, etc. In 2018, Melissa also accepted a part-time job with New Yorkers for Clean Power (NYCP), a statewide non-profit campaign, as an Outreach Representative. In this role, she helped plan a Waste Conference with the Ulster County Environment Management Council and a Climate Solutions Summit at SUNY New Paltz in 2019. Melissa left her full-time GIS/Geography career and joined NYCP full-time in Fall 2021 as their Program Manager and brings her management background, event planning, and passion to the campaign to help in the facilitation, campaign outreach, and overall achievement of NYCPs deliverables in the transportation, power, and building sectors. Through her NYCP work, Melissa has helped plan collaborative events like the Kingston Earth Day Fair and a conglomerate of non-profit booths at the Ulster County and New York State fairs.
Jake Straus
Jake Straus grew up in Dutchess County and has been fighting climate change since childhood. He studied Environmental Policy at UC Berkeley and Energy & Environment at Columbia University's School for International & Public Affairs, where he led a team of students in developing a climate awareness and disaster preparedness curriculum for young adults in Jakarta alongside the mutual aid nonprofit Indonesia Resilience Generation. He has worked professionally on heavy-duty freight trucking electrification in India, utility-scale solar photovoltaics in the US, and most recently on evaluating energy efficiency programs run by utilities and state agencies to ensure they reduce emissions, provide equity, and save ratepayers money. He loves reading science fiction and hiking in the beautiful Catskills.
SPONSORS
The Kingston Repair Cafe has many partners and co-sponsors: the Kingston Climate Smart Commission, Kingston Transition and Radio Kingston.
