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Celebrating Four Years of Repair Café

Communications
Sep 1
3 min read

Four years ago, on July 22, 2022, the Broadmoor Improvement Association joined Billie Golan to host the first Repair Café in Louisiana at the Broadmoor Arts & Wellness Center.That first Repair Café invited residents to bring in their “broken but beloved items” and work alongside local Repair Coaches who volunteered their skills and knowledge. More than simply getting an item fixed, the event gave neighbors a chance to sit in community, learn the art of repair, and share practical skills with one another.Four years later, Repair Café continues that mission of extending the life of everyday items, keeping usable materials out of landfills, and bringing people together through the shared act of repair.To celebrate Repair Café’s four-year anniversary, we sat down with founder Billie Golan to reflect on how the work began, why repair matters, and how more people can get involved.


What inspired you to start Repair Café, and what need did you see in the community?


“So what inspired me was other Repair Cafés. I went to school in Upstate New York, where Repair Café was getting popular in the Hudson Valley. The idea of Repair Café is that it’s a community event, a free event run in some sort of community space. It could be a library, a church, or a community space like BIA.Those Repair Cafés were popping up in towns near where I was going to school. It was catching on. There was a Repair Café every week, and I visited them and saw the connection. It was very purpose-driven, to fix things that people walked in with, and I really loved that.And then when I moved to New Orleans in 2020, I looked at the Repair Café database and map to see if there were any nearby, and there were no Repair Cafés in Louisiana. So I thought, let me take my resources, my time, and my experience and start one here. I gathered all these really talented people to become Repair Coaches, and then we found this space. Natori was the one who said yes over the phone. This is happening here because of Natori. That was in July 2022, and ever since then, we’ve been running Repair Cafés.”


What do you want people to understand about Repair Café and why this work matters?


“We have the power to keep our items for longer. And we should and we must, because they are created to be destroyed by us. They’re created to be put in the landfill, and then we spend money on a new item.So Repair Café is a way that we revolutionize our way of living so that we extend the life of our products. We form human connections, community connections, and we keep our items out of the landfill. That is the revolution part of it. And so every time we have a repair, we’re involved in a repair movement , which is worldwide, and it’s a movement that we’re living in.”


How can people get involved or support the mission of Repair Café?


“Awesome question! So Repair Café is run on volunteers, so I’m a volunteer. My Repair Coaches are just handy people. Some of them live in this neighborhood, and they can fix a few things really well, and they volunteer their time.So anybody, even if you can sew a button, even if you know woodworking, even if you just tinker, you could become a Repair Coach. Or you could volunteer to take pictures or videos and help us with our own social media presence. Or you can always donate to our Venmo, which helps keep us supplied with things like light bulbs and lamp parts. So when someone comes in with a lamp that we want to rewire, we have that on hand.”


Email Repaircafenola@gmail.com with their questions or donate to their venmo


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