Social Entrepreneur: Conscious Companies | Benefit Corporations | Impact Investing

What Sandra Goldmark learned from a seven-year experiment fixing stuff. Sandra Goldmark is the Director of Sustainability and Climate Action at Barnard College. For seven years, she ran Fixup, a popup repair shop for household items of all kinds. It was staffed by theatre artists. “We use our backstage skills to fix people's broken stuff,” Sandra explains. “and to create an alternative to use and discard.” Sandra has gathered her lessons learned and put them in a new book, Fixation: How to Have Stuff without Breaking the Planet. “We are reinventing repair as a viable part of a sustainable, equitable, circular economy,” Sandra says. “We were mobile, so there was no fixed storefront. We accepted a wide range of items as a one-stop drop-off for our customers. We used an event-type structure to create a sense of urgency and community. And we partnered with a range of organizations.” It started with a vacuum cleaner. Around 2013, Sandra had a problem. Several items around her house broke – a lamp, a toaste