A Repair Cafe, where volunteers can help community members with simple fixes, is planned for Jan. 25, 3-6 p.m., at Cook Memorial Library in La Grande.

LA GRANDE — Do you have a cherished or functional item that needs fixed? Do you want to contribute toward solving the problem of our throw-away culture while learning something new?

Thanks to the efforts of Donna Rainboth and Lia Spiegel, La Grande has its very own recurring Repair Cafe. There have been three previous Repair Cafes held in La Grande with events scheduled every two to three months, alternating between weekends and weekdays.

The next Repair Cafe will be Thursday, Jan. 25 at Cook Memorial Library Community Room, 2006 Fourth St., from 3-6 p.m.

Repair Cafes are a worldwide movement that strives to preserve repair skills and promote more repairable products. The very first Repair Cafe was organized in Amsterdam in 2009 by Martine Postma. This was a great success and prompted Postma to found the Repair Cafe International Foundation, which provides professional support to local groups throughout the world wishing to start their own Repair Cafe.

There are now Repair Cafes in not only the Netherlands, but also in Belgium, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and dozens of countries around the world, with a total of 2,500 and counting. Repair Cafes have even popped up in India and Japan.

The goal of the Repair Cafes is to reduce waste by having people learn that items can be fixed. Each Repair Café is staffed by volunteers with different repair skills.

In La Grande, these include people who can fix wooden items like chairs, tables, and perhaps toys, small electrical appliances, such as toasters, fans, radios, lights, and boom boxes, and outdoor gear fixes like zippers in sleeping bags and tents.

They also can perform simple bicycle repairs and general mending like patching jeans, as well as knife sharpening and care.

The volunteers teach folks to do simple fixes themselves and are building a community of people who can help fix things by working together, giving things new life and keeping them out of the landfill.

For more information, contact Spiegel at lspiegel@eoni.com.