So, in case you don’t know (because we didn’t really announce it), I’m nominally the Education Director for TransitionPGH, at least for the next 6 months to a year. What does this mean? It means I’m in charge of putting together events like movie screenings, and for connecting ‘people who want to know things with people who already know them’. 

It also means that I can pursue the idea of reskilling events (something I’m super excited about) - learning skills that our grandparents knew that we have, perhaps, forgotten. Seeing as I also don’t know many of these skills (think: canning, fence rail splitting, etc.), some of this will be me finding people and convincing them to teach a workshop (are you one of these people? Let me know). 

But to start, I’d like to focus on one particular set of skills: Repair. It’s sometimes called the '4th R’, as in ‘Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Recycle’ (ordering is purposeful). This means being able to fix some of our clothes rather than throwing them away or donating them, it means extending the life of our appliances and replacing parts rather than whole objects. There are a lot of things that can be repaired, and some of them are easier to teach than others. What I envision is an open afternoon with stations for different things, with the occasional formal lesson and lots of time in between for more informal questions and teaching. Come when you like, learn what you need, have a good time. I have a short list of things for this event in mind (buttons, clothing rips, basic bike maintenance) and my father has suggested toilets as well - I think Construction Junction would let us borrow one or two as demonstrations for the event.

But I have a question - what do you want to learn to fix? Leave a comment and let me know - and I’ll toss out the event when I get a time and place sorted (quite possibly August - I want time to build this up properly).