2025 Year of Repairs
Last year WNC Repair Cafe volunteers met 25 times at 14 different locations across 4 counties, helping 636 people fix 838 items with an 87% success rate. We strengthened local community connections at Buncombe County Libraries, Haywood Community College and the Asheville Tool Library, while reaching new communities in Madison and Transylvania counties and beyond. WNC Repair Cafe volunteers helped design semester-long repair skills education programs, reaching youth in Haywood County as young as 2nd grade.
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| Hands-on learning in Haywood County |
WNC Repair Cafe organizers spoke at conferences, sat on community repair panels, and interviewed with national media outlets. Our friends in the Repair Cafe NC network expanded their offerings across the state, organizing impressive events in the Triangle, Winston-Salem, Charlotte, and Henderson and Transylvania counties. Globally, there are now more than 3,800 registered 'repair cafes' - nearly twice as many as when WNC Repair Cafe volunteers met for the first time in 2018.
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| Mock Repair Cafe at the 2025 Carolina Farm Stewardship Conference |
It's clear we are experiencing a cultural shift in the way people experience - and take full ownership of - the material objects that surround their everyday life. 60% of visitors to 2025 WNC Repair Cafe events noted they were motivated by sustainability. 51% were there to save money and 38% came to learn repair skills. Even more were motivated by a sense of building stronger communities. Many visitors simply didn't have anywhere else to go for repairs.
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| More hands-on learning |
Motivated by community support, we are sustaining the momentum with an ambitious schedule in 2026. We're committed to strengthening existing connections in Buncombe and Haywood Counties, while reaching new communities with a rotation of four events at the Weaverville Community Center, and a series of mobile pop-ups in counties further north.
Follow this link for a complete Google Calendar of 2026 events.
Consider downloading and printing our 2026 Calendar and sharing physical copies within your community.
For further announcements, follow us on Social Media, or send an email to WNCRepairCafe@gmail.com to join our mailing list.
2026 Schedule Coming Soon!
Hi Friends of WNC Repair Cafe!
A Repair Cafe is a place where you’ll find volunteers with tools and supplies, available to fix broken objects while offering instruction hands-on experience in the art of repair. Repair Cafes are free programs, where you are encouraged to bring in your broken appliance, stuck zipper, rusty tools, old bicycle, dull pruning shears – whatever you can imagine – and work with volunteers to make the necessary repairs to keep it running.
Repair Cafes around the world help build resilient communities by:
Helping a neighbor: Restoring valuable material items at no cost of labor.
Sharing skills: Teaching repair skills and encouraging hands-on learning
Sharing ideas: Sharing insight and appreciation of how things made, repaired, and disposed of.
Diverting resources from the landfill: Engaging in practical action on waste reduction.
Empowering our community with the skills and resources to prosper in a sustainable economy.
WNC Repair Cafe started in Mills River in 2018, and following the pandemic, expanded to various communities in Buncombe and Haywood Counties. For 2026, we're proud to announce we are including regular events in Weaverville, as well as expanded pop-up workshops in Madison and Yancey Counties, along with continued partnerships with Henderson County Repair Cafes. Repair Cafes are expanding rapidly across North Carolina and the United States. We are proud to be a part of this tradition of helping neighbors, thriftiness, good conversation, and passing down skills to future generations.
Along with our expansion in 2026, we'll be focusing on improving the experience for visitors and volunteers alike. For the next two months, WNC Repair Cafe is building an advisory team to help organize and improve a variety of metrics, including successful repair rate, visitor educational experience and volunteer satisfaction. This is a lot of work, so please be patient as we head in 2026! We'll be releasing our schedule shortly after the new year. For now, you can expect an ambitious schedule of over 24 workshops, and in-person repair workshops to resume in February 2026.
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interesting in Helping? There are many ways you can help:
Join our Mailing list and be the first to receive notices of new events by sending an Email to WNCRepairCafe@gmail.com
Follow us on Social Media @WNCRepairCafe
Are you a skilled fixer? We need your help!
Do you have other skills you are excited to offer? Can you provide snacks? Help with fundraising, media, or data management? We need your help too!
Are you in Weaverville? Help us build our volunteer base for 2026 workshops
2025 Schedule
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2025 is going to be a big year of recovery for Western North Carolina and community repair will be as important as ever. We're pleased to announce a robust schedule of events with our community partners at Buncombe County Public Libraries, Asheville Tool Library and Haywood Community College, while also leaving room for Pop-up repair events at the Organic Growers School spring conference, Asheville Maker's Faire. Stay tuned as we'll be adding MORE pop-up events in early spring and summer, along with a special FREE high-school repair education program taking place in Haywood County this spring.
Sewing and Mending Repairs include: all things that can be fixed with thread, including hand stitching and those that require sewing machines and sergers. Zipper repairs and boot/shoe glue repairs will be offered as well. Sorry, no sewing machine repairs are offered here.
House Hold Repairs include: all small home appliances, tools, heirlooms, small engines, furniture, sewing machines and almost anything else you can imagine. "If it comes from your house and if fits in your car, we'll fix it for free." Sewing repairs are typically not offered here, but may be offered in the future. Additionally, we reserve the right to limit repairs for concerns of safety, for example, CRT TVs, firearms, automobile repairs are not offered.
Please email WNCRepairCafe@gmail.com for questions and volunteer opportunities.
Post-Helene 2024 Schedule Update
October was a huge month for all of us in Western Carolina.
Back in 2018, when we first started, our press releases were
already including language like "building resilient communities." Last
month we finally saw what those words actually mean, and now, more so
than ever I'm incredibly honored to be a part of this community we've
built.
Huge thanks as always to the many
volunteers that have helped in the past, and especially to those that
came out in October to one of our many disaster relief repair pop-ups.
In the three weeks following Helene, the course of 10 pop-up repair
events, our volunteers looked at over 600 Chainsaws and at least 50
generators, all while boasting a nearly 90% success rate! Because of volunteer help, and the foundation we've laid over the past 6 years, we are
now in a position to literally define how community repair groups CAN be
mobilized quickly to respond to natural disasters in their
communities.
Communication was a little hectic for a while there! Sorry for all the
confusion coming from me about new dates, and cancelled events, etc. Here is an updated calendar to clear up any confusion about the remaining schedule for
2024:
Reaching New Communities in Haywood County
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WNC Repair Cafe is expanding further west into Haywood County - We're very grateful for our friends at Haywood Community College and First United Methodist Church for welcoming us into this already resilient and tight-knit community. Although the WNC Repair Cafe leadership will remain constant, this is almost like starting a new program entirely from scratch; we're actively recruiting local volunteers in the area, so please help us spread the word, and we're looking forward to meeting everyone in April!
Stitching Stuffies
We're very excited to announce these special children's repair workshops, hosted by Buncombe Co. libraries and made possible with a grant from Culture of Repair!
We believe that sewing is a safe and accessible repair skill that children can learn with help from experienced adults, and we believe that teaching a child to repair their stuffed animals is a great opportunity to foster a culture of repair starting at a very young age.
These workshops are about more than just teaching skills. Focusing on tactile, accessible, hands-on skills provides an opportunity to introduce concepts of environmental sustainability that feel concrete, and immediate, as opposed to solely abstract learning. Children have an intimate connection with their stuffed animals, and through repairing their stuffed animals, which they can then take home, children will have a daily reminder of their ability to improve their material world; a potential direct connection to positive environmental outcomes and their improved self-esteem.
We'll begin the workshop with a short lesson that puts the act of repair in the context of environmental and economic sustainability. Following the lesson, one of our skilled repair coaches will demonstrate a simple overhand stitch, and then we'll break into small groups where children can learn to repair their own ripped or town stuffed animals. Each small group of children will have it's own skilled repair coach to guide children through their own repairs. All children will go home with a stuffed animal that they have successfully repaired on their own.
Attendance is limited to 20 children for each day. Sign up following the links below:
February 22 from 4:30 to 6:00, Pack Memorial Library
March 6 from 4:30 to 6:00, West Asheville Public Library
March 9 from 10:30-12:00, Pack Memorial Library
March 23 from 12:30-2:00, West Asheville Public Library
Do you have stuffed animals you'd like to donate to the program? Drop off locations are at the Pack Library children's room and the West Asheville Library. Do you have a large lot you'd like to donate? Email Dan at WNCRepairCafe@gmail.com and we can arrange a pickup.
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