I'm Peter Skinner I'm the founder of the
repair cafe in Palo Alto
I have dozen original organizers of the
event I was very interested in doing a
grassroots kind of organization that
addressed a global problem I wanted to
do this at a local level start small
scale and see where it take us we
welcome anybody to bring whatever thing
they can carry that's broken that they
like help repairing my main role here is
to serve sort of as coordinator for the
items as they come in to repair cafe I
try to learn about the volunteers and
know what their skill set is and you try
to assist as possible once we've matched
people up with a repair person they then
sit down and either work on the device
together with a repair person or watch
the repair person actually do the repair
themselves so we brought a garden tiller
we use it every time before we went and
that study and so I didn't know I could
have hoped to see why it's tough but
then I'm coming to the experts it's my
grandmother's lamp that I inherited has
a switch that needed to be replaced so I
walked out to the store replaced it and
now they're trying to put it back
together again they test it and found
that it does work one of our goals here
is for people to walk away with the
notion that whatever they have that's
broken is likely to be repairable if
they just spend a little time thinking
about how to do it our repair rate is
probably about 70% we've had maybe 1,500
people
and head over 2,000 items to tackle me
I've been surprised at how easy it is to
find volunteers to participate in the
repair of cafe we have people who are
fixing lamps people who are working on
bikes those who really understand
complex electronics usually have about
50 volunteers total maybe about 10 or 15
our coordinating volunteers and the rest
are various fencers I'm the volunteer
fixer here at the repair cafe Palo Alto
and I've been coming here for a couple
years and I liked fixing bicycles but we
take anything there is no set way to fix
something there is no one solution and
so it's a great problem solving and
using there are probably five or six
different solutions to each problem and
it's not clear always which one is the
best one one of the things that I
clearly wanted to do was to create an
opportunity for people to address their
propane things but also to think about
repairing and reusing things as opposed
to just running to the store
replacing things and throwing that
broken item from the landfill
we've seen over the course of the last
40 years a tripling in the amount of
waste that each individual generates in
the United States and for us to be able
to create an opportunity to counter that
trend and actually begin to reverse it
even at a local level is really
satisfying