On a recent Saturday afternoon, dozens of residents filed into a community center in South Orange with lamps, bicycles, stereos, jewelry, guitars, clothing, small furniture and assorted household bric-a-brac, all in various states of disrepair.
Tables lined the gymnasium. Behind each was a handyman, a hobbyist, seamstress or a gadget expert – all volunteers, all with a skill to share and a shared interest in helping a neighbor or a stranger restore a well-worn but still-valued object.
“The Repair Café,” as this Oct. 26 event is named, has been a bi-annual tradition co-sponsored by SOMA, Two Towns for All Ages since 2017.
The event is one of several efforts led by the joint age-friendly initiative serving South Orange and Maplewood that is aimed at stoking volunteerism as a means of keeping residents connected and civically engaged. SOMA Two Towns has also co-sponsored Volunteer Fairs, in which local nonprofits outline their community service opportunities to interested residents, and helped launch a new club in South Orange called FORT, which stands for “Figuring Out Retirement Together.”
“We’re looking to create opportunities for people to feel more invested in their community, particularly older people who may be new to the area or recent retirees who are looking to stay active and engaged,” said Kristen Tyler, South Orange’s coordinator for SOMA Two Towns for All Ages.
Age-friendly community work is often associated with physical infrastructure goals – the need for housing, transportation or community design changes. But redesigning a community’s “social infrastructure” is also an essential ingredient in creating a more livable environment for people of all ages.
SOMA Two Towns prioritizes civic and social engagement, and with each passing year, The Repair Café event has sought to advance those goals by engaging people of all ages in the shared environmental goal of keeping useful items out of the trash stream.
The motivation for the Repair Café events is to reject the “throw-away culture” and re-invigorate the “repair culture,” which is more effective at reducing waste and more energy-efficient than recycling, said Lorraine Gravesof the South Orange Senior Citizen Advisory Committee, one of the groups organizing the event.
“It’s also become a community-building event,” Graves said. “For the repair people, it’s energizing. They love to fix things, but they also like they are doing something for the community. You’ll see many of them not just fixing the items, but also spending time with each participant teaching them how to make repairs themselves.”
Likewise, many of those coming with a clock to be fixed or a knife to be sharpened often converse with the repair people, sharing the history and personal significance of those items, Graves said.
“You really see people making connections with each other,” she added.
Members of the Senior Advisory Committee helped plan the Oct. 26 event, which also enlisted a local Girl Scout troop to help greet attendees and record items to be repaired.
“It’s great because this is something that is bringing people together – young and old,” said Tonia Moore, chair of the senior advisory committee. “They see it as something that both helps the community and helps the environment.”
This year’s Repair Café was held in the Baird Center, South Orange’s new community center, which has become a hub of programs that are helping older residents connect with one another and with young people in the town.
Tyler noted that those attending the Repair Café event usually leave with more awareness of other community programs and civic engagement opportunities, and just as importantly, “people have made friends here.”
“This event has proved to be meaningful to the community in many ways, and we see it as a success to keep building upon,” Tyler said.