San Francisco’s First Repair Café Connects Mending-Minded Neighbors

A line of quiet individuals had already started to form outside the lower level entrance to the Park Branch Library in San Francisco well before the doors opened at 1:30 p.m. on a recent Saturday. One held a black KitchenAid mixer. Another carried an answering machine.

“Gotta keep the stairway clear,” the library security guard repeated politely, as people in line shuffled to extend westward along Page Street.

Such was the scene outside the Haight-Nopa Repair Café, held every other month since October 2025. The concept of a Repair Café is simple: In an age of disposable consumer products and planned obsolescence, people bring their broken household items to get fixed. Despite the event series’ consistent popularity across Europe, and the fact that repair has had its own international commemoration day for a decade, the Haight-Nopa outpost is San Francisco’s first Repair Café.

Co-founder Claire Bonham Carter, her jeans and black tee paired with a signature red apron so she’s always visible in the crowd, walked the line as the event got underway. Inspecting each person’s items, she murmured, “We’ll try, we’ll try.” Individuals seeking repairs held or stood next to their items: an espresso machine, a crossbody bag, a pair of jeans. A repair technician emerged from the library to blast canned air at a circuit board. Slow Street Coffee’s Zaid Zayouna pulled up on a cargo bike to deliver free beverages.

In a small atrium, volunteers greeted event participants next to a long table piled with free homemade baked goods, ranging from ube cookies to blueberry friands baked by Bonham Carter. In the bustling community room, seventeen repairers ran stations devoted to most repair types: electronics, appliances, jewelry, sewing. Underscoring the analog nature of the event, one sewing machine displayed a sticker that read: AI AIN’T IT.

At a station meant for any miscellaneous item, Rich Ridlen and his nine-year-old son, Rocky, watched the jack-of-all-trades technician Michael Murray tinker with their 3D printer. The machine had been Rocky’s favorite Christmas gift last year, and it recently experienced what’s known in 3D printing as the blob of death, with filament clogging up on the nozzle. If Murray couldn’t dislodge the mass and liberate the spout, he informed them, he’d send them home with resources to try fixing it on their own.

There are limits to what repairers will attempt. Items still under warranty are turned away, along with anything hazardous, such as items that may contain asbestos. Also, no leather stitching and no zipper replacements, which are too specialized and time-consuming. Bicycle repairs are referred to one of the city’s many bike clinics, including free bike repair workshops at public library branches.

And while the majority of Repair Cafés elsewhere boast mending roughly 50% of items, leave it to San Francisco’s volunteer makers, geeks, and tinkerers to beat those stats. At the October event, 66 out of 84 items were repaired, a whopping 79% success rate.

At one point in the afternoon, sitting behind the checkout desk, Leland Abels rang a bell, signaling another successful repair. Muted cheers floated up around the room. Then, using one of two scales, he weighed the successfully repaired item.

Weight, it turns out, is a valuable metric that can capture exactly how much stuff repair keeps out of landfills. What weight can’t capture is the time and money saved on replacing an item, or the feeling of freedom to finally throw something out if it’s proven that a repair isn’t possible. It also doesn’t capture the joy and excitement in a room buzzing with conversations between neighbors.

Bonham Carter regularly turns down requests to run her event in other neighborhoods. She can’t move her operations elsewhere, nor does she want to. But to meet growing demand, she’s hosting a free workshop on Nov. 17 for any organizer wanting to start their own hyperlocal neighborhood repair clinic. Already, one of her former volunteers, Allie McAndrews, runs an offshoot in the Mission.

Tucked in a back corner of the library, jewelry designer Bobbie Kipreos was extending her skills to repair for the first time, inspecting a broken gold ring that Katrina Strich said her mother received from an ex-boyfriend 20 years ago. Inside a repair kit made from a repurposed coin collector notebook, with coin-sized sleeves containing beads and bits of metal, Kipreos found a piece of silver and asked Strich if she could experimentally solder it to close the gold loop.

“Do what you want,” enthused Strich, who walked to the library from her home on the other side of the panhandle. “Light it on fire!”

At each Repair Café session, the doors close to new arrivals half an hour before the event officially ends. But approaching 3:30, a solid line of people still filtered in, carrying things like a Dyson vacuum cleaner and a foldable electric scooter.

“I’ll be back in December,” cooed a woman who carefully embraced Bonham Carter while holding a repaired table lamp in each hand. Behind them, a sewist handed back a mended cushion and chirped, “I hope it’ll last!”

By the exit, Abels weighed a large blanket, and thanked its owner for coming.

“It feels like the neighborhood is really interconnected here,” he said. “People care.”

The next Haight-Nopa Repair Café will be held at the Park Branch Library on Sunday, Dec. 17, from 1:30–4 p.m. More information here.

Haight-Nopa Repair Café co-founder Claire Bonham Carter will host a workshop for aspiring Repair Café organizers at the Park Branch Library (1833 Page Street, San Francisco) on Tuesday, Nov. 17, at 6 p.m.