Fix your stuff and find your people at Repair Cafe RVA

Earlier this week, a nonprofit research group, Oceana, published a study indicating that by 2030, The Coca-Cola Company alone will send enough plastic waste into the world’s waterways and oceans to fill the stomachs of 18 million whales. It’s just the latest scientific evidence of something we’ve known for decades: our culture of disposable consumption, combined with a feeble regulatory regime that allows corporations to subsidize costs and privatize profit, is fucking the world up. Not ideal!

It’s The Lookout’s considered editorial opinion that unfucking the world requires systemic, rather than individual, change. We can’t just curbside-recycle our way out of this jam. But taking control of your own relationship to the stuff of life, plastic or otherwise, can help reduce waste. And as founder Repair Cafe RVA, Jenny Kobayashi Malone, sees it, it pays social dividends, too.

“The first obvious purpose of Repair Cafe RVA is the sustainability piece,” she told The Lookout in a recent phone interview. “Repairing things, keeping things out of landfill, not needing to buy new things. But I think the second, just as important pillar is building community.”

Malone, who’s lived in the neighborhood for more than half a decade, launched Repair Cafe RVA late last year. It’s a chapter of Repair Cafe International Foundation, a nonprofit umbrella group founded in the Netherlands in 2011 that provides resources and support for some 2,500 independent chapters worldwide. (The actual org predates the nonprofit by about five years; the general idea of fixing things instead of throwing them away is more or less timeless.)

On Sunday, Repair Cafe RVA is setting up shop at Robinson Theater for its first workday in the East End after several successful pop-ups around the city earlier this year. So if you’ve got something in your shed that doesn’t work anymore (a bike, a coffee maker, a necklace with a busted clasp…), and you were going to send it to the landfill, here’s your chance to give it a second chance—for free.

While Malone describes herself as a “tinkerer” who “dabble[s] in a lot of areas” of repair, she isn’t planning to fix anything and everything that comes through the door. Far from it. “We're going to have about 50 volunteers,” she said. Repair Cafe RVA’s database of pro bono patcher-uppers is already about twice that. “I would say we've got a pretty good breadth of skills, but someone from the community reached out to me asking for knife sharpening, and we just have maybe one or two people who can do knife sharpening,” she said. “We're always looking to add volunteers, because having depth is always helpful.”

At Sunday’s event, they’ll be ready to tackle, appliances, bikes, electronics, furniture, jewelry, textiles, toys, and more. You can find more information on what they can handle on Repair Cafe RVA’s Instagram; you can also fill out a repair request form, and/or a volunteer application. At the theater on Sunday, a volunteer will be manning a registration desk to help direct attendees to the right repairers based on their needs. There are no guarantees, of course—Repair Cafe International is emphatic that it’s no substitute for a professional technician—but “we’d love to check out anything,” said Malone.

Fixing up neighbors’ possessions to keep them out of the landfill, or whales’ bellies, is good shit on its own merit. But Malone believes that Repair Cafe RVA can help improve the resilience of the neighborhood, not just the sustainability of its stuff. “It's a mutual-aid operation, with everyone sharing the skills and resources that they have, and anyone who needs [something] is able to receive it,” she told The Lookout. “That means that people in the community get to sit on both sides of the table.”

It also means neighbors have the opportunity to meet and share their skills with one another outside the contexts of consumption. Thus, what Malone considers the true “beauty” of the Repair Cafe concept: neighbors coming together for “one sweet, meaningful interaction, then go[ing] their separate ways, having cared for each other in that time.” And maybe feeling a little less helpless about the world, and their place in it, too.

📜 Possum Poetry

Possum Poetry is original verse written exclusively for The Lookout by Penelope Poubelle, the Lookout’s litter critter-at-large. If you spot roadside trash you’d like her to immortalize in doggerel, email a photo to [email protected]. All submissions anonymous!

🪧 Youngkin booed, liberty cheered on Church Hill

As you’ve likely heard by now—and maybe heard at the time—Governor Glenn Youngkin got booed mercilessly by hundreds of protesters surrounding St. John’s Church this past Sunday. Check out the clip above from Richmond reporter-about-town Goad Gatsby, or this other angle from WVTF’s Brad Kutner.¹ I filed a brief report to The Lookout’s website on the event Sunday afternoon, but didn’t send it out in an email blast because I didn’t want to hit your inbox twice in three days. Maybe that was the wrong call, editorially speaking? Gotta figure out how The Lookout covers breaking news.

💰 Triangle Park fundraiser doubles target

The sun was shining and the indigo bath was… ah… bathing (?) last Saturday on the western end of Jefferson Avenue for Friends of Triangle Park’s first official fundraiser since becoming a formal entity earlier this year. I stopped by mid-afternoon to check in with co-organizer Harry Herskowitz and toss an old t-shirt in the blue slurry his fiancé, Jess Fauscette, had cooked up for indigo-curious attendees. The vibes were wonderful, what with the early blooms beginning to appear and the community showing up to support the volunteer-led effort to beautify the charming little wedge of greenspace.

Speaking of support: Herskowitz tells The Lookout that between contributions to the Friends of Triangle Park’s GoFundMe page, and the donations they collected last Saturday, the group raised over $1,000 to fund its next round of building and planting. That’s more than double what Herskowitz had hoped to raise. “Planting day will be April 19th,” he texted The Lookout. Mark your calendars—and of course, if you’re feeling generous and still want to chip in to help your neighbors improve one of Church Hill’s most overlooked parks, the GoFundMe is still going.

📢 Happenings on The Hill

• Stone’s union-busting tab: The brewery down the hill, a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Sapporo, spent over $100,000 to squash a Teamsters drive in fall 2024. Your humble Lookout editor (a booze journalist by trade) got the scoop based on new federal filings. Read my column.

• Pop-up papi: Tito Gonzalez, a longtime barman at Grisette on E. Marshal St., is taking over Beaucoup this Sunday for an afternoon of Argentine food and drink. More about Mal Ocote (that’s the nombre).

• Get energized: Lookout Fusun S. is leading a free Tai Chi Chih presentation at the Linwood Robinson Center on Monday (3/31) at 2:30pm. Here’s the flyer.

• Be a Flow-Rider: Southside ReLeaf and the University of Richmond have kicked off a new community science project to gather info on how/when/why Richmond floods, and they need your help. Sean Sublette has more info.

Happenings on The Hill is a digital bulletin board for events, causes, and other items of interest to East Enders that don’t necessarily merit full editorial treatment. Got something for a future edition? Email the relevant details, links, etc. to [email protected] for consideration!

📸 A Very CHill Photo

Want to share your Very CHill Photo from the neighborhood? Email it to [email protected] with your name as you’d like it to appear for publication, and the camera you shot it on.

1  Correction 3/30/25: A previous version of this newsletter incorrectly listed the station for which Brad Kutner reports. It is WVTF, not WKTR. The Lookout regrets the error.