Poughkeepsie

The Poughkeepsie Repair Café is back! It is being organized by Poughkeepsie resident Lisa Kaul in collaboration with the Town of Poughkeepsie’s Climate Smart Task Force.

Lisa grew up in India and was used to a culture of fixing things mostly because people couldn’t afford to buy new ones. When she moved to the U.S., she quickly learned that sometimes it is cheaper to replace a broken item with a new one than to get it fixed. But there are some beloved items that are irreplaceable. So, she was thrilled when a coach at a Repair Café sewed the seams of a frayed ottoman that had been a gift from her parents giving it a new lease of life.

During the pandemic, Lisa had the good fortune of walking daily in an ecological preserve as she listened to books like All We Can Save and Braiding Sweetgrass. As she marveled at the natural world, she puzzled over how she could contribute to the work of saving the planet, especially since she didn’t have any technical skills.

Post-pandemic, one word ricocheted around Lisa’s mind: repair. The social fabric had unraveled, the planet was on fire. Everything seemed hopeless and fragile. Around this time, she came across an old sweater that held a special place in her heart. She had usurped it thirty years ago from her then boyfriend, now husband. Their otherwise sartorially picky nineteen year-old took one look at the sweater and fell in love with it. It fit him perfectly. There was only one problem: parts of the sweater looked like swiss cheese. So Lisa watched a video on YouTube and darned the sweater somewhat imperfectly. That act of fixing something tangible, of making something whole again filled her with joy and gave her hope.

And that’s when she knew she had to help out at the Repair Café in her town even though she didn’t really have any “fixer” skills. When she reached out to Sustainable Hudson Valley she found out that the organizers of the Poughkeepsie café had moved elsewhere. With some trepidation, Lisa decided she should use her organizer skills to revive the Poughkeepsie café. She reached out to Susan Karnes Hecht, the Town of Poughkeepsie’s Climate Smart Task Force chair and Feza Oktay, a member of the CSTF to see whether the CSTF would be interested in collaborating with her. They were!

Lisa got to figure out a small way to fight against climate change by helping to keep things out of landfills. More importantly, she got to do this with other people. One stitch at a time, as they say!