By Tyler Webb, CapRadio
On the second Saturday of every month, people gather in a community space to make repairs on a variety of household items and socialize with their neighbors.
RosaLee Hagstrom is a founder of the Oak Park Fix-it Cafe, a repair workshop held in the Oak Park neighborhood.
“It is one of the rare places where nobody has an agenda, and that is beautiful. Everybody just feels comfortable and accepted,” Hagstrom said in an interview with CapRadio’s Vicki Gonzalez on the Insight program. “It's just all volunteers and they just have to have a willing spirit to come and jump in.”
The inspiration for the Oak Park Fix-it Cafe came in 2016 when a group of people from the Oak Park Neighborhood Association, a community-building organization, wanted to establish a repair shop in Oak Park similar to fix-it cafes that are more common in Europe. They then began holding the program in the fellowship hall of a local church.
“I think people are becoming more and more conscious of our goal to keep things out of the landfill,” Hagstrom said. “More people are aware of it now and wanting to participate, so that's wonderful.”
People from all over the Sacramento region come to the Fix-It Cafe with items including clothing, bicycles, lamps, and appliances.
Anyone with an interest in assisting with repairs can become a volunteer, whether or not they have background experience.
“We do have a specialist at each station, and then we have people who kind of come in as apprentices if they don't know all the things,” Hagstrom said. “So, if you want to learn electrical, you can come and just be an apprentice. You don't have to jump in and know all those things to be the main repair person.”
Community Shop Class
The Oak Park Fix-it Cafe is held monthly at the Community Shop Class, a nonprofit workshop in Oak Park founded by Chad Orcutt, who says that the purpose of Oak Park Fix-it Cafe aligns perfectly with the values of his organization.
“Putting tools in people's hands has been my goal since the beginning, and we've been able to do that. Oak Park Fix-it Cafe gives us a chance to teach even more people how to use tools and repair things. So it's a match made in heaven,” Orcutt said in an interview on Insight.
Community Shop Class hosts other similar classes, including Toolbox 101, which teaches participants to use the tools provided by the organization.
According to Orcutt, among the most meaningful repairs that have been made at the workshop include mobility devices and family heirlooms.
Orcutt said a particularly special repair is a 19th century walking stick passed down through generations. Orcutt estimates that he will have spent over 14 to 20 hours working on the walking stick when the project is finished.
“As soon as I found out what RosaLee and the group was doing down at the church, it was an instant, ‘I need to have them here at Shop Class,’” Orcutt said. “Our goals are to reduce waste, create a more sustainable environment to get people to start mending things instead of throwing them away.”
A space for neurodivergent folks
The Oak Park Fix-it Cafe and Community Shop Class are not simply focused on repairing household items. They both aim to strengthen bonds in the community of Oak Park.
“Mending things doesn't just apply to a fence or a piece of furniture. Bringing people back together with their neighbors, that's how neighborhoods get mended,” Orcutt said. “And my thought has always been that the most important thing that gets mended at the Fix-it Cafe is community.”
Orcutt founded the Community Shop Class with the purpose of providing a learning space to neurodivergent individuals with learning differences. He started the organization after leaving his job at Apple, where he worked for nearly 15 years, because the company was not accommodating to his needs as a person with ADHD.
“So that kind of propelled me to leave Apple after fighting for a little while with them. But when we built this place, I was like ‘I want to build the environment where neurodivergent people feel safe to learn,’” Orcutt said.
Orcutt’s organization provides specialized training to people with ADHD and autism. “When people find out that we're doing some really innovative stuff and how neurodivergent folks learn, they want to support it,” Orcutt said.
Losing federal funding after Trump executive orders
In addition to providing an important learning resource for people with learning differences, Orcutt has been a tool-confidence and safety trainer for AmeriCorps members.
AmeriCorps is a federal agency that offers volunteering, education funding, and job opportunities.
“It’s a program I believe wholeheartedly in. They get money for college, they get to travel and get involved in community projects. It's amazing,” Orcutt said. His organization has been receiving federal funding through the program for the past four years.
But despite his commitment to training AmeriCorps members, his organization was dealt a blow when they received a call from Washington D.C. saying that there was a problem with the annual application.
The call stated that he must add verbiage to his application stating that he would not allow core members to take part in learning exercises that went against executive orders barring language on DEI and climate action. Orcutt was conflicted because values of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, along with climate action are integral to the operation of his organization. He realized he could not comply with the executive order and therefore had to end the training program.
“There is no Shop Class without diversity, equity, inclusion, and climate,” Orcutt said. “We don't have anything else that we do here.”
Orcutt says the tool confidence and safety class was built specifically for AmeriCorps members.
“That was my favorite program that we ran here. We built this tool-confidence and safety class that was innovative. We taught so much in this 4-hour class,” Orcutt said, adding that there were fewer reported injuries as a result of the training.
“It breaks my heart. These kids from AmeriCorps, I have kids that come back three years later, back to Sacramento, and they want to come by and say hi because they remember the training they had here,” Orcutt added. “So emotionally, it was a bigger hit probably than even financially it was for me.”
Orcutt said that the loss of funding from AmeriCorps will impact Community Shop Class's ability to receive federal funding provided by the agency in the future.
Orcutt’s nonprofit organization relies on funding from a variety of sources, and without federal funding it will have to seek community donations and program memberships.
AmeriCorps did not respond to a request for comment on how the Trump administration’s executive orders have affected their programs.
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