Repair Cafes are heartwarming community events that encourage and enable building personal connections while also teaching important repair skills. Local fixers sit across from neighbors they may never have met before while fixing their beloved but broken items, for free, at these joyful get-togethers. What is fixed at a repair cafe? Lamps, jewelry, clothing, furniture, bikes, beloved toys, computers–whatever walks in the door! Anyone who wants to learn to be a fixer can get involved at subsequent repair cafes–no one needs to be a professional, they just need to have a passion for helping, tinkering, and learning and we will pair them with a more experienced fixer who will teach them. At the end of a successful repair cafe, a significant number of items have been kept out of the landfill too.

Unfortunately the Newburgh Repair Cafe hasn’t been held since May 2023. The original founder of the cafe moved away and the baton has recently been passed to us, Kate Clarke and Kristen Thornton-De Stafeno at the Newburgh Free Library (NFL), which will also serve as the new location for the Newburgh Repair Cafe. After so much time, it is like starting a cafe from scratch in terms of the work to be done, but we know the city will be delighted to see it return. Newburgh is one of 10 Repair Cafes in Orange County and one of 70 in the network (www.repaircafehv.org). We will have the support of RCHV Coordinator, Suzie Fromer, who was very excited when we reached out as she has received numerous inquiries about when the Newburgh cafe would return. She has a thorough ‘to do’ list to help us approach this task, a large drive of shared resources and an active google group of the other RCHV coordinators. In addition, she has a fixer list and will reach out and connect us with many of the past cafe fixers so we know we are in good shape. We will also solicit new fixers from the community - the more the merrier!