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 materials; someone's time, initiative, skill and ingenuity; energy; cultural resources; and financial capital.

Through the quality attention repair requires, combined with the exhilaration of fixing an object, perception is transformed.

That transformation will naturally extend to the larger material world.

A shift in culture.

The Focus of the Work

The Culture of Repair Project focuses primarily on supporting teaching about repair in K - 12 educational settings, and integrating the mindset, technologies, thinking skills, systems understandings, and value of caring, into instruction across subject areas.

Emphases: Environmental Literacy and Maker Spaces

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.

Shaping the Project

These elements affect the structure, tone, approach, objectives and activities of the Project:

• The work has always been done in collaboration with others — together we are we are a force, sharing a mindset that values taking care of what we have; we are part of a wave washing over the globe, working to advance a culture of repair.

• We recognize that the inclination to repair broken objects is an expression of a mindset, an attitude toward the material of our lives. Repair is a manifestation of a stance that expresses across all sectors of society, an articulation of an understanding of who we are and what’s important. In short, repair is a matter of culture.

• The initiative’s work is tightly focused on primary and secondary school age youth because they are still forming their understanding of the world, and because our educational institutions wield outsized authority and impact in shaping communities’ values. While outside our focus, we also step up for other facets of the global repair movement’s work — policy, arts, grassroots activism, scholarship, etc.

• Repair is a global issue, yet the underpinnings of how repair does or doesn’t operate in the economically developed world are both profoundly interrelated with and significantly different from those in the economically developing world. As such, we recognize that the forces at work in the economically developed world are materially different from those in the economically developing world. Given our limited resources and proximity to economically advantaged communities, our work is focused on addressing the issues shaping how people in economically developed areas respond to broken objects.

• The Project’s structure and execution is grounded in and guided by a recognition of finitude and interdependency, by a sense for the ineffable, by scholarship, and by an ethos of care for people, our non-human companions, and the Earth.

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.

The Culture of Repair Project will take a political position relative to right to repair. Beyond that:

The Project is a non-partisan initiative.

Repairing objects together allows for the possibility of seeing each other’s humanity. Showing up to repair together makes space 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.

 The Culture of Repair Project is fiscally sponsored by Philanthropic Ventures Foundation.

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