Every second Friday morning, the community center in a small neighborhood in Riverside fills with broken things: toasters that don't toast, lamps that don't shine and trousers with holes in the knees. Behind the tables sit volunteers with screwdrivers and sewing machines, ready to bring them back to life.
The "Repair Café" was started by two fifteen-year-olds, Jonathan Ezra and Megan Cohen. "It began when my mom wanted to throw away our kettle," Jonathan says. "Only the switch was broken. I watched a video, fixed it in twenty minutes, and thought: how many other things are thrown away for no reason?"
Megan, who learned to sew from her aunt, was immediately interested. Together they asked the community center for a room and put up notices in the neighborhood. They also invited retired people with practical skills — an electrician, a carpenter and a tailor — to join them.
The idea is simple: visitors don't just leave their item and come back later. They sit next to the volunteer and learn how to fix it themselves. "We're not a shop," Megan explains. "We want people to leave with a working toaster and with the confidence to fix the next one."
In their first year, the volunteers repaired more than three hundred items. But for Jonathan, the best part is not the numbers. "Our oldest volunteer is eighty-two, and our youngest is twelve," he says. "Where else do people of all ages sit together and solve problems?"