On Saturday, Sept. 28, 2024, Willard Middle School hosted the first of three Fix-it Fests to be held this year. In collaboration with Transition Berkeley, Fixit Clinic, Nimble Repair, and Culture of Repair, a mix of local environmental justice and repair groups, Berkeley Unified School District’s first ever Fix-it Fest was a success with almost 100 estimated participants receiving help.
The Fix-it Fest is part of a growing movement towards encouraging waste reduction through engaging with and connecting communities. Efforts to reduce waste grow increasingly important as people continue to default towards replacing or getting rid of broken items.
“When something doesn’t work, we throw it away, and there’s nothing around us to tell us not to,” said Linda Currie, co-director of Transition Berkeley.
Transition Berkeley aims to build a regenerative and sustainable future for the city through connecting the community. Event organizers drew inspiration from many similarly designed repair festivals such as the Festival of Maintenance and Repair Cafés which are community repair events held throughout the world.
“We started planning this when we wrote a grant back in February, and we got a five thousand dollar grant to help fund the costs of doing this,” Debbie Lenz, Makerspace teacher at Willard and one of the main organizers of the Fix-it Fest, said. The money went towards custodial support, repair supplies, and advertising that would need to be provided for the event.
Experienced volunteers offered their help free of charge to people with items in need of repair. The Fix-it Fest was an opportunity for the Berkeley community to come together, aiming to promote repair skills and display how acting together can make a difference. “This kind of event is really awareness raising,” Currie said.
For students, the project was a blend of the climate lessons that have been taught since the climate literacy resolution in 2021 and skills they may have learned in the Makerspace. The Makerspace is an elective class offered to anyone enrolled in Berkeley Unified School District middle schools. Lenz describes the class as a “technology, engineering and design lab,” which works towards the goal of developing problem solving and critical thinking skills through hands-on experience.
Leading up to the Fix-it Fest, students in the Makerspace program completed a week-long unit focused on repair. Before the remaining Fix-it Fests are held at Longfellow and King Middle Schools, classes there will participate in the same unit. According to Lenz, students are “learning how to take something apart, put it back together and make it work.” Some Makerspace students volunteered at the Fix-it Fest, working as assistants to repair coaches, carrying signs, and directing confused participants. Each time an item was fixed, a designated bell-ringer sounded a bell.
After seeing a flier at a Berkeley Zero Waste commission meeting, Terri Hannon signed up to be a repair coach. “I got a screwdriver when I was six years old, and I started taking things apart,” she said, “I was always curious. You never know what’s inside.” Hannon showed up early to help set up and was able to repair an old watch before the event even started.
“People have these skills and they come, they give up their time, and come and help out,” Currie said. 30 volunteers signed up to be repair coaches, and another 20 signed up to assist with event coordination.
While the turnout for coaches was high, Lenz was worried initially that there weren’t going to be enough participants bringing items for the event, “We’re turning away coaches because we’re like, only 10 people signed up, but then, as of this morning, 90 people had signed up to bring things,” she said.
Planning for these events requires a lot of work, and organizers met every week during the six months leading up to when it was held. Although it was a brand new project for BUSD, and Lenz and Currie had no prior experience to guide them, the event ended up being a success.
“It’s just heartwarming,” Currie said, “you know, people are so busy they don’t know each other … we’re all rushing here and there, but this kind of event, it sort of slows us down a little bit.”
With the strong response to the first Fix-it Fest, attention now turns to the next two in the series. Organizers are focused on the continuation as well as refining of event operations.
King Middle School will be hosting the next Fix-it Fest on Saturday, Nov. 16, 2024, and Longfellow on Saturday, Feb. 8, 2025. After a successful first event, Currie has high hopes for the following two. “I’m feeling very confident after doing this first one … it was a lot to get to this point, but I feel like we have a lot of things in place now for the next two coming up,” Currie said.