In late 2012, I was running Waste Nothing<\/a>, which listed options for reducing waste by type of item, and I wanted to do something that was more direct action that just listing others’ services.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I saw what was going on with Repair Caf\u00e9s<\/a> in the Netherlands. With my background in the software world, I was thinking agile, and minimum viable product. The MVP for this, for me, was to limit the scope to things that could be repaired with a needle and thread. While my early thinking was a single big event inspired by Soupstock<\/a>, I settled on a different plan – although the “big event” thinking is when I came up with the name “repairathon.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n I would recruit volunteer clothing repairers, solicit material donations, and book our group at existing community events that already had lots of attendees. This would all keep the risk of failure pretty low: if nobody donated anything and nobody volunteered, and it was just me by myself with my own thread and sewing machine running the event, it could still be a success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Aside from the goals of this new group (reducing waste, etc…. see the repairathon<\/a> website), there were two things I wanted to achieve:<\/p>\n\n\n\n #1<\/strong> – a money-free organization. Just once – I thought – we could have something that wasn’t an economic transaction. So we didn’t accept financial donations, we didn’t spend any money, we didn’t charge for events, we would not pay to participate, we wouldn’t attend events that were not free to attend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I would say this worked quite well on the whole… there were some events that wanted us to pay to attend and when we told them of this policy, they would waive the fee. There was perhaps a single volunteer who wanted compensation for the transit fare to come volunteer, but that’s a longer story. And we did relent and accept donations in the form of food for volunteers to eat during the event if purchased from food vendors that were also attending the event.<\/p>\n\n\n\n #2<\/strong> – a great experience for volunteers by expecting nothing of them other than showing up, and by giving them only actual useful work (i.e. clothing to repair). This grew out of my experience showing up to volunteer for things where the organizer didn’t have work for me to do yet, or wasn’t sure what to do, or had us doing not-especially-useful tasks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This one mostly worked as well, although many volunteers did transition to taking on other roles. We were occasionally asked to attend an event that was more of an information-type event, where organizations had a table to tell other people about their work. I always told organizers that if we are attending an event, we are working. We will repair clothes, not just tell people we repair clothes. I think this worked well too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I posted online asking for volunteers, and later asking for material donations. It was very exciting to get both. Around the same time I reached out to to a few events that I thought we might join. We picked a date. We had an in-person volunteer meeting<\/a> (just about the only one I ever held). I personally collected all the donated materials<\/a>, by bike.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And, well… it worked. Our first event was in April, 2013<\/a>. We planned a second event and we started to get some media publicity<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In keeping with my aim to have the volunteers do the rewarding part, I continued to recruit volunteers and donations, plan future events (after confirming with volunteer availability), manage social media, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Around this time another group reached out to me<\/a> as they too were interested in doing a Repair Caf\u00e9, an effort I supported from the beginning. We didn’t work directly together as much as I anticipated, but we promoted all their events and attended most of them (myself or another volunteer) with our materials.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I planned to collect a ton of data, and I had a laptop with a spreadsheet all ready to go, as you can see in the photos from the first event. I figured we would be able to say exactly how many of which types of items we repaired. This lasted a total of one event, as it wasn’t really practical to do all that data collection during the event… as I was also taking on the role of greeting everyone and introducing them to the concept. I didn’t end up doing much repair work myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We decided we were never going to use the large spools of thread used in serger machines that had been donated, so I donated them on to the Toronto Tool Library<\/a>, a then-new organization that I also supported and did some volunteer work with starting when it was just an idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We were occasionally asked to do an event associated with a company, and I always said “no” to those. I didn’t want others to get credit for our work, for us to be seen as endorsing anything, or for us to attend events that didn’t feel “public.” I did encourage those organizations to run their own repairathons with their own volunteers\/staff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As those who have more experience managing volunteers than I do will attest, there can be problematic volunteers. People who complain a lot, ask for things that don’t align with the group’s goals, etc. We really only had one like this. Of course I was always nice to them, listened to their needs, explained in some cases why something wasn’t going to happen, encouraged them to pursue certain things on their own with any help we could provide, and directed them to more positive directions. In the end, they dropped out of participating, and that’s okay… you can’t please everyone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That leads to the next issue… this person wanted to be compensated for the transit fare of getting to events to volunteer. This wasn’t a bad idea per-se but it conflicted with how I had hoped to match volunteers to events. What I wanted to do was have a handful of volunteers in every neighbourhood, and those people would do the events in that neighbourhood… as many or as few events as they’d like… not to have a few volunteers spread throughout the city and travelling greater distances to volunteer. We never really reached anything like this… in practice there evolved a core group of volunteers who did most of the events throughout the city. I did try to encourage and support other groups in running repairathons further from downtown and in adjacent cities, in some cases loaning all our materials out so that they only had to supply the volunteers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The last issue for me was attendance. I always assumed that some volunteers would end up having to drop-out of an event last-minute, which I took into account when determining if enough people were available for an event to be scheduled. But then there was one event, where all the other volunteers didn’t show up, leaving me to do the greetings, repairing, photo-taking, and no bathroom or food breaks. It was doable but I was tired and decided it was time to actively hand off work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The other volunteers more than took up some of the work, they completely took it over. I didn’t plan or attend a single event after that other than as another volunteer sewer. They chose, plan, and ran the events. It was great. All I was doing at that point was forwarding emails and keeping the materials (mostly a single suitcase) at my home. Events continued for years and I was barely award of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We really did so much great work. We fixed so many clothes and other textiles, across a lot of events throughout the city. And not just any clothes, clothes that people really loved. I remember a woman with tears of joy after we fixed her purse. And by “we,” I of course mean the actual volunteer that did the repair. Some random things too… like this couple that asked us to sew a waterproof cover on a dress as their infant daughter refused to wear a bib.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We heard from others outside of Toronto who wanted to do the same thing. A group in Edmonton comes to mind. We did what we could in terms of advice, encouragement, and promotion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was interviewed on CBC’s Metro Morning<\/a>. While I often enjoy public speaking when I choose to do it, live radio with a huge audience was terrifying even though I had done it once before for Waste Nothing. I was on a panel discussion about clothing waste<\/a> with people who were actually experts. I did a number of other interviews for newspaper, radio, etc., but at least they were not live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sometimes we got request for work that was not repairs, like making custom clothing or tailoring. We referred these requests to local businesses, or to any of our volunteers who wanted to take on paid work independently. People were volunteering their time and I was always happy for them to let people know if they also had their own businesses, as long as it was clear that the repairathon itself wasn’t promoting or endorsing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One thing I hadn’t planned on was the friendships. The repairathon coalesced around a small group of active volunteers who became life-long friends. That’s priceless. The COVID-19 pandemic ended all in-person events of course, and the repairathon has not run an event since. And that’s okay. Neither I or the volunteers (which had long since not included me) felt the need to get it going again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Repair Caf\u00e9 Toronto<\/a>, which covers all types of items (not just textiles) is very much still running, and our former volunteers sometimes attend those. Earlier this year we gave all our remaining materials to the Repair Caf\u00e9.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yesterday I finally updated the repairathon website to indicate all this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is my blog, so of course this is all written from my perspective and pertaining to me. I hope it’s clear that while I got things going initially, this was only ever possible because of so many others. Even those people who just volunteered at a single event and were never part of organizing things, their contributions were what made the repairathon a success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For the friendships alone, this has been one of my greatest achievements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The idea In late 2012, I was running Waste Nothing, which listed options for reducing waste by type of item, and I wanted to do something that was more direct action that just listing others’ services. I saw what was … Continue reading Starting off<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
What didn’t work, problems, and changes<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
More outcomes and happenings<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\nEnding the group<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
The volunteers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n