{"id":18941,"date":"2020-02-05T09:00:48","date_gmt":"2020-02-05T17:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=18941"},"modified":"2020-02-11T09:04:04","modified_gmt":"2020-02-11T17:04:04","slug":"camosun-student-faces-societal-issues-with-repair-cafe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2020\/02\/05\/camosun-student-faces-societal-issues-with-repair-cafe\/","title":{"rendered":"Camosun student faces societal issues with repair caf\u00e9"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just because something can\u2019t be used doesn\u2019t mean it can\u2019t be saved. It just means it hasn\u2019t yet seen the hands of first-year University Transfer student Savannah Barratt. Barratt is part of the Camosun Innovates Innovators Club. The club will be hosting an upcoming repair caf\u00e9, where students and staff can bring their broken goods to be fixed or reused.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Barratt\u2014a former youth in care who was part of the BC government\u2019s Provincial Tuition Waiver Program\u2014knows the value of social innovation. With the repair cafe, she hopes to combat what she calls our \u201cthrowaway culture.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s also got large roots in social endeavours,\u201d she says. \u201cSo kind of thinking about, \u2018Something is broken. It\u2019s not working in a society, so you figure out a way to fix it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

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Camosun students and Camosun Innovates Innovators Club organizers Savannah Barratt (right) and Joseph Brady (photo provided).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

But many people today have lost the skills needed to fix things themselves, because it\u2019s been a while since we needed to fix things ourselves.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe get something; it breaks. We throw it away instead of fixing it,\u201d says Barratt.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So, being at Camosun\u2014an institution with many students in trades, business, or technology programs\u2014Barratt wanted to try to put a stop to that. Throwaway culture\u2019s impact on the environment is, after all, devastating.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s bringing together a whole bunch of resources that we have and changing a social problem,\u201d she says, \u201ceven if it\u2019s just for a day.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But there are limits on what this repair caf\u00e9 can fix. Barratt says that if you can carry it in your arms, you can bring it in. Think about that small appliance that you love, but isn\u2019t quite working anymore. Think about small electronics, she says, or that wooden bird with the broken wing that you don\u2019t know how to fix.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cA shirt you love, but you have no idea how to darn a hole,\u201d she says. \u201cYou\u2019d throw it away if someone didn\u2019t know how to fix it for you, and that\u2019s where we come in.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s resource demand, she says. When you don\u2019t need to do it anymore, you don\u2019t spend the valuable resource of time; no one teaches you how to do it because they weren\u2019t taught.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s faded out of our society a bit, and that has had counter-effects, kind of cascading effects\u2026 and one of those things is producing a lot of waste,\u201d she says, \u201cbecause we can just buy another one.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It seems like a small problem, but it\u2019s not, says Barratt. Waste adds up. But an important point to raise, says Barratt, is that some things aren\u2019t built to last the way they used to be.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cPart of this repair caf\u00e9, and repair caf\u00e9s in general, is, yes, fixing things, yes, talking about the problem of consumer waste, but also the idea of thinking about the components of things, and why they work the way they do,\u201d she says. \u201cKind of the knowledge transfer of people who know things and know how they work, and people who think, \u2018This only does one thing.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The repair caf\u00e9 is happening on Thursday, February 13 from 3:30 until 5 pm in Jack White 102 at the Interurban campus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just because something can\u2019t be used doesn\u2019t mean it can\u2019t be saved. It just means it hasn\u2019t yet seen the hands of first-year University Transfer student Savannah Barratt. Barratt is part of the Camosun Innovates Innovators Club. The club will be hosting an upcoming repair caf\u00e9, where students and staff can bring their broken goods […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19010,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,247],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-campus","category-february-5-2020"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18941"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18943,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18941\/revisions\/18943"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}