The Ames Repair Café, a volunteer-driven initiative in partnership with the City of Ames and the Ames Public Library, brought sustainable services to Iowa State on Tuesday evening in collaboration with Open Access Week.
Parks Library worked alongside the Ames Repair Café, the department of industrial design and the Office of Sustainability to host the first on-campus Repair Café event, where volunteers assisted with bicycle repair, sewing projects, electronic and appliance repair and more.
The Repair Café aims to reduce waste, share tools and resources and help build self-reliance skills for community members to begin repairing on their own.
Ryder Souder, a freshman majoring in mechanical engineering, brought his bike in to be fixed after finding out about the Repair Café through a flyer. Souder said his gears were not shifting properly, but getting free bike repair on campus made things easier.
“I was like, ‘Oh my bike is kind of broken, and it’s making it difficult to get around campus,’ so I figured I’d take advantage of this,” Souder said.
At Repair Café events, volunteers help members of the public repair broken items to extend the life cycle of their products for a sustainable future.
Erin Quinn, an academic advisor for the College of Design and a frequent volunteer for the Ames Repair Café, offered sewing repair services for Iowa State students at Tuesday’s event.
“Sewing is just something I do and have always wanted to do more, so it’s nice to have a reason,” Quinn said.
The teal sewing machine table Quinn uses for repairs was found on the side of the road and given to her by Vikram Bhargava, a coordinator and founder of the Repair Café and a friend of Quinn.
Quinn said she repaired some small holes in jeans and worked on a dress with older seams that fell apart after a while.
“Someone brought in some pants just now that also needed a big waistband, more of a tailoring job, or a repair job, but that was fine,” Quinn said. “We had time and supplies, so we took them in. I don’t know if you’ve ever bought pants off the rack that fit perfectly, but most people haven’t.”
With the theme of this year’s Open Access Week being “Community over Commercialization,” Lisa Muccigrosso, a librarian and book conservator at Parks Library and the campus liaison for the Ames Repair Café, said the initiative fits well into the week of activities.
“Open Access Week is all about opening avenues for information—not just scholarly resources, but spreading information if folks have a skill, teaching others,” Muccigrosso said. “There’s a lot of information out there that if you don’t know how to tap it, you just don’t know it’s there, and so bringing like-minded folks together in a Repair Café environment seemed to really fit in with the Open Access ethos.”
Quinn said she hopes to continue the campus Repair Café events and said she imagines other volunteers would also like to keep doing it as well, with hopes of publicizing the event more.
“A lot of college students, you know, you’re holding your life together with duct tape, living in a dorm and you realize one day that you don’t have scissors yet because Mom always had them and now you don’t, so I think it’d be really helpful [to continue],” Quinn said.
