Joliet Junior College is seeking volunteers for its annual Repair Cafe event at its Romeoville Campus.
The Repair Cafe is hosted annually with the goal of bringing people together within the community to fix broken items and keep those items from ending up in landfills.
The event will run on Saturday, April 18 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the JJC Romeoville campus at 1125 W. 135th St.
Volunteers are needed to man repair stations for electronic appliances, furniture and wooden objects, textiles and clothing, shoes and leather, ceramics, musical instruments, toys, bikes and carts, jewelry, and miscellaneous repairs using tape, glue, or string.
All repairs are done for free and can be conducted by professionals or handy amateurs or hobbyists with experience in their repair area and a willingness to help teach others basic repair skills.
For those who are not handy but still wish to help with this environmental, cost-saving effort, volunteers are also needed to help direct customers and keep lines moving efficiently.
Monetary donations are also accepted to provide the necessary repair supplies for fixers.
JJC has been hosting its Repair Cafe events since fall 2023. It took inspiration from a trend started in Amsterdam nearly 20 years ago with the aim of salvaging damaged items rather than letting them go to waste by being thrown away.
The effort also comes with the added benefit of saving people money replacing damaged-but-fixable items.
Since the creation of the Repair Cafe movement in the Netherlands, over 3,600 recurring events have been established world wide, though the Romeoville event is one of only seven which is regularly hosted in Illinois. Other events are hosted in Chicago, Evanston, Urbana, Aurora, Oak Park, and Lyons Township.
The events are becoming more popular with time in the U.S. When JJC started its event, there were only nine registered in the entire Midwest, a region which now hosts between 30 and 40 events annually, according to the Repair Cafe movement’s official website.
Volunteer registration for the Romeoville Repair Cafe is open on the JJC website through Saturday, April 11. Any questions should be directed to the event coordinator Dre Spreitzer at andrea.spreitzer@jjc.edu.
The event is open to everyone and will also include discussions and video presentations on environmental sustainability.