Meet our most dedicated repairer volunteers to-date!  

The Haight-Nopa Repair Café has a list of about 130 volunteers, built up since May 2025.  Of those about 60 have volunteered one or more times.  Of course, weekends are valuable and many of those volunteers who have not yet participated may have always had a conflict with the Repair Café date and/or time.  Alternatively, they may have gone to the event specific form to sign up and found that their preferred role is already full….  

We have had four repair cafes to date (with the fifth coming up on July 25^th 2026), and there are three amazing volunteers who have participated at every event.  We wanted to find out what keeps them coming back and celebrate their dedication by doing a little profile on each of them.   Please meet Four Time Repairer Volunteers Lilly, Taran and Curtis and find out:

• Why they decided to volunteer for the Repair Cafe in the first place, and what keeps them coming back 
• What is the favorite thing they have repaired or that was most rewarding
• Their advice for patrons

(Their responses have been edited for brevity in some instances)

Lilly

• I volunteered at the Repair Cafe because having a crafternoon is one of my favorite ways to spend my time! The community and positive atmosphere keeps me coming back. It is so fun to be in a group of people that all showed up for the sole purpose of helping a neighbor, and it is so rewarding to be able to do a small, tangible task and see how meaningful it is to someone in the community! 
• Favorite repair: One man came in with a pair of pants that his sister had left at his house and he was patching them up with fun colorful patches and returning them to her for her birthday.
• Advice for patrons: I am requesting in the future that people who get something fixed by me bring me a fun piece of neighborhood gossip in exchange. Please do your homework and come prepared!

Taran

• I found Repair Cafe while looking around the intersection of public service and environmentalism; repair attempts make me feel generous, successes make me feel competent, and the social energy is uplifting and contagious.
• Some repairs have sentimental value or an interesting story, others just resurrect a utilitarian but expensive item — there’s such variety! I loved fixing wiring on a fancy old hifi amp that I thought shouldn’t work the way it was being used, but it did!
• Repairs are free, so get out of consumer mode and into neighbor mode!

Curtis

• When I first saw the flyer on a light pole looking for volunteers at a repair cafe, I immediately knew I would sign up. It has consistently been a rewarding experience talking to patrons about what these objects mean to them and being able to either resolve the problem they have or help them feel okay letting go. But the reason why I have prioritized volunteering is the sense of community and chance to learn. The energy of the repair cafe can be hectic, but seeing people share tools, skills, and good vibes to help people so directly is what keeps me coming back. I have also had multiple things repaired and I love being able to sit and learn from the other people around me. 
• My most rewarding repair was one during the first repair cafe. It was a portable DVD player brought in by a patron whose screen was mostly black. I took it apart, tried what I could, but couldn’t fix it myself. I set it aside and marked it as unrepairable, but we had extra time, and four different repairers ended up looking at it, trying different things, and ultimately while one person was working on the back of the screen and one watching the front, we were able to realign a paper thin cable and get it working again. 
• My advice to patrons and anyone thinking of volunteering as a repair is that no one can know everything, but anyone can ask for help. One of the first things I do is to look online or ask other repairers. A Google search of “Shark vacuum flashing red light” might lead to a Reddit post about someone having the exact same issue and the steps they took that fixed it. When talking to other volunteers during the first repair cafe, almost everyone said something along the lines of “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to fix anything that people bring in”, but every time we surprise ourselves at what we are able to fix. Unfortunately, especially with modern electronics, not everything is designed to be able to be fixed when it breaks. For more information on how to support the Right to Repair movement, check out  https://california.repair.org/ for what you can do to help change that. 

 ‘Meet the repairers’ is going to turn into a regular series, so come back soon, and meet our most dedicated bakers and registration volunteers.