The Repair Café of the Hudson Valley and Catskills will be featured on NBC’s “The Today Show,” scheduled to air this Friday, April 21 at 8:30 a.m. Earth Day watchers will see first-hand how community members come together with tools, refreshments and a creative spirit to help each other fix “beloved but broken objects.” Repair Café volunteers will be onsite at NBC headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan with a truckload of tools and objects to be fixed!

“We are thrilled to have this opportunity to share the Repair Café movement on such a big platform,” said project coordinator Suzie Fromer. “There are a lot of cafés in the U.S already, but we really hope this inspires people in every state to start them."

The show came across Repair Café at a local repair event in Tarrytown, New York, one of 45 locations from Schenectady to the New York City border hosting regular fixing sessions for the community. In addition to capturing video and conducting interviews locally, Today producers have invited a troupe of seasoned fixers to demonstrate what they do on the broadcast.

Today producer Carlos Perez Beltran pursued the Repair Café story as part of his climate change beat. “It can be challenging to cover the climate crisis as most reports focus weather events and catastrophic projections, but stories of resilience and community, such as this one highlighting Repair Cafes, can really connect with an audience eager to hear about effective action and adaptation,” he said. “This was a wonderfully wholesome story.”

In 2022, waste was 12 percent of New York State’s carbon footprint, according to Gov. Kathy Hochul’s 2022 State of the State address. Repair Café of the Hudson Valley and Catskills has kept over 3,000 items out of the landfill, which for our region is several hours away at Seneca Meadows in the Finger Lakes region.

The Repair Café has taken off as a community project with a distinctive commitment and a lot of creativity from its volunteers. Participants with repaired objects are photographed with colorful “I Fixed It!” signs. Cafés are held at libraries, church basements, senior and community centers, and sometimes at maker spaces with tool libraries and other equipment to encourage more crafty behavior. International in scope, the Repair Café movement is the subject of several books including Repair Revolution (New World Library) coauthored by Hudson Valley Repair Café founder the late John Wackman and Elizabeth Knight.