Paul Oppenheim (left), David Stoklosa (center, behind table), and Bob Hetzel (right) analyze a lamp repair.
By Laurie Casey
Do you have a “broken” pile or box in your home? You know, those things that need to be glued, screwed or otherwise mended? Clothes needing mending collect near my sewing box, which I store in a side table near our sofa. Things that need to be glued or reattached usually end up in our dining room, where we have enough space to work. But sometimes you need the experts. Who do you call? Next time, try bringing your broken treasure to the Oak Park Repair Café at Fox Park. Not only will you stand a good chance of getting your item fixed for free, but you just may come home with new skills and even a new friend.
The Repair Café movement began in Holland with a mission to reduce the amount of waste going to landfill or incinerators, reduce resource consumption, and build a sense of community.
Nancy Bauer co-founded the Oak Park Repair Café with Mac Robinet in 2013. “I am very concerned about the environment and have been for a long time,” says Bauer. “We’re very much a disposable society. I see [the Repair Café] as a way to keep people’s stuff working, so it’s not in a landfill.”
The worst thing to say is, ‘it’s cheap, it’s not worth fixing,” adds Robinet. “It’s not always about saving money. Maybe someone is attached to an item. Or they don’t want to create waste by throwing it away. Repairing is the ultimate recycling.”
True to its name, the Oak Park Repair Café operates as a sort of community center. It’s filled with tools, as you would expect, and lots of friendly people willing to lend their hands and know-how.
“We’re trying to keep alive the skill sets to fix things,” says Paul Bauer, Nancy’s husband, and a Repair Café volunteer. “We’d like to get younger people involved. It’s important to transfer the repair mindset and skills to the next generation.”
About 12 people routinely volunteer as “Repair Coaches” at the Café. Typically, about six to eight come each month. Not all live in Oak Park. In fact, several drive from Brookfield, Palatine, Naperville and other locations throughout Chicagoland.
“It’s a collective effort,” says Robinet, who leads the Repair Coaches. “As a group, we can do almost anything. Some people lean more toward one area than others. . . . This past Saturday, we were able to fix everything. . . . If you can carry it in, we will give it a shot.”
There’s one rule: people who bring things to be fixed need to stay with their item and engage in the repair in some way, even if it’s simply holding the item while the coach walks them through the repair.
It won't cost you any money, but you will have to be willing to give a few minutes of your time and your attention.
With input from the Oak Park Health Department, the Café has temporarily modified its stay-with-your-item policy: If you aren’t vaccinated, you may leave your item and the coach will call you when it’s completed. But for everyone else, expect to mask up, watch and learn.
Lamps are the most common item that people bring in. Fans, CD players, mixers, toasters, breast pumps, clocks, toys, chain saws, vacuum cleaners, dresses needing hemming, broken light-up shoes, orange hot pots from the sixties—they’ve seen it all.
The Repair Café has a variety of tools including a sewing machine. Repair coaches bring their own complement of tools. The variety is such that someone will always have just the right tool for the job. Since 2013, the Oak Park Repair Café has fixed more than 1,500 items, according to Paul Bauer, who maintains the Café’s website. Their “fix rate”—the ratio of items repaired to items brought in—is an impressive 68%, which is slightly higher than the average for Repair Cafes internationally.
Some things the team won’t repair: expensive jewelry or computers. Those require more specialized skills.
So how did our Oak Park Repair Café get started? Coincidentally, Robinet and Bauer heard about the movement around the same time in 2013. Nancy read an article about the Repair Café movement in the New York Times.
“I thought it was so perfect for this community,” says Bauer. “It touches on so many of the things that this village cares about—environmentalism, social activism, teaching and sharing skills, and senior citizen engagement. So, I wrote to them, and they wrote back to me and told me that someone with my same zip code just contacted them! [My husband Paul and I] went to Mac’s home and met his wife, Harriet, and we started planning.”
For his part, Robinet read about the Repair Cafe movement in an AARP magazine, emailed the Repair Café headquarters on the spot and got a response almost immediately suggesting he connect with Nancy.
“Nancy has a background in marketing. We decided she would do the advertising and I would recruit and organize the fixers,” says Robinet. “The biggest challenge was finding a place. Repair Cafes in other countries move around to different places every month, and that’s hard. We wanted a regular location. I called 15 different places. Some asked us for $100 per event. We found the Lifelong Learning Center at the Oak Park Arms. It was perfect.”
The Repair Café enjoyed a long run at the Oak Park Arms from 2013 to 2020. But the Café shut down for a year during the COVID-19 pandemic. When Robinet and Bauer were ready to reopen, they learned the space had been leased to a private preschool. Luckily, the Park District of Oak Park came to the rescue and offered a space and marketing help. Bauer chose Fox Park for its central location, plentiful street parking, and lots of windows that allow for good ventilation. Robinet adds that there are outlets all along the walls and room for everyone to spread out and social distance.
Our local Oak Park Repair Café has the honor of being the second Repair Café to have been established in the U.S., according to Paul Bauer. There are four others in Illinois and only two others in the Chicago area: in Chicago’s North Center neighborhood and Evanston.
Robinet’s next mission is to get more Repair Cafés started on the city’s West and South Sides. He is mentoring a Repair Café that operates at the Austin Branch of the Chicago Public Library on the last Saturday of each month. September 25th will be this location’s first event since the pandemic began. Robinet hopes to find more volunteer coaches for Austin as well as other sites.
“We’re hoping that we can spread the word [about opening new Repair Cafes and finding Repair Coaches to staff them]. I know they are there, it’s a matter of finding them and getting the word around.”
What does it take to be a Repair Coach? “It’s not a matter of having a lot of expertise, it’s a willingness to ask the right questions and work with a group,” says Robinet, who has come to really enjoy repairing CD players. “One of the most interesting things—with a group, there’s not many things we can’t fix. Often someone will say, ‘before we give the last rites to this, what do you guys think?’ ”
In recent years, the team has gotten very skilled at conducting Google and YouTube searches to find instruction manuals and patents to help them repair items.
“A guy brought in an antique stapler that was broken,” says Robinet. “We took it apart. A tiny little part was bent. We fixed that, and when we tried to put it back together, we couldn’t do it. We found the patent online and were able to put it together in a matter of minutes.”
The Oak Park Repair Café is held the first Saturday of every month from 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Visit www.Repaircafeoakparkil.org for more information. To learn more about volunteering as a Repair Coach, contact Mac Robinet at [email protected]
To learn more about the international Repair Café movement, check out www.repaircafe.org.