The Bottom Line
Repair makes us whole.
Repair is a relational, practical, philosophical, spiritual and environmental imperative.
Remembering Repair is urgent.
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Repairing our things is a stake in the ground for a creative and responsible relationship with our physical world.
Repairing our things offers a gateway for seeing there’s a way to live that’s empowered to take care of ourselves, our communities, and the Earth.
Unsurprisingly, Repair is a vibrant and surging international movement.
The Mission
That Repair be an actionable, compelling and pervasive value in our culture.
The Approach
The initiative is fundamentally about shifting how we perceive and engage with the things in our lives, recognizing and valuing what's already present in objects: natural resources, someone's time, skill and ingenuity, energy, cultural resources, financial capital …
Through the quality attention repair requires, combined with the exhilaration of fixing something, perception is transformed. A shift in mindset.
That transformation will naturally extend to the larger material world.
A shift in culture.
The Focus of the Work
The Culture of Repair Project is currently focused primarily on supporting teaching about repair in K - 12 educational setting, and integrating the mindset, technologies, thinking skills, systems understandings, and value of caring, into core K - 12 subject areas.
The Culture of Repair Project supports initiatives working toward a world that reflexively, competently and confidently turns to repairing before discarding stuff and buying anew. Support takes the form of collaborating with other organizations, providing logistical support, sharing information, networking, and helping secure funding.
Non-Partisan Initiative
Repair is one of the rare places where people with very different socio-economic, cultural and political backgrounds can meet in genuine and mutual respect.
I have worked with organizations that subsequently took political positions on matters not related to my work.
The Culture of Repair Project will take a political position relative to right to repair. Beyond that:
The Project is intentionally and resolutely a non-partisan initiative.
Repairing objects together allows for the possibility of seeing each other’s humanity.
I believe in showing up for the profound personal, relational, and social possibility in that connection.
Summing It All Up
The Culture of Repair Project is about more than just diminishing resource usage in manufacturing, transporting and selling new products, and post-consumption. At a more fundamental level it’s about cultivating the well-being of individuals, communities, and the natural environment through changing our relationships with the material objects in our lives. It’s about reshaping our culture into one that takes care of and repairs what's important to us, as a matter of course.
A posting on the community bulletin board at The Crown Pub in Hastings, UK in 2017