The Maintainers Quarterly-ish Newsletter
Q3 2023: Virtual Events and Blog Posts Abound!
Dear Maintainers,
We hope you are doing well this season! We have been balancing enjoying the sunshine, learning from our Movement Fellows, and strategizing for the years to come. There will be ample opportunities to learn, share knowledge, and collaborate with Maintainers across many sectors in the coming months. Additionally, we have been sharing a collection of thought-provoking blog posts for you to read, and also invite you to share your thoughts on maintenance, repair, and care with our community through blog posts. Please reach out to us if you are interested in sharing your work!!
Take care,
The Maintainers
UPCOMING VIRTUAL EVENTS
The Essence of Repair Culture2023 Maintainers Movement Fellows Virtual Events
September 12, 2023 | 8am EDT (East Coast USA) | 3pm EAT (Uganda) | Zoom
Join Maintainers Movement Fellow Mathew Lubari in this virtual event, exploring maintenance, repair and care across countries and global contexts. Mathew is a 2023 Maintainers Movement Fellow, in the "cultures" pathway fellowship. This event will explore the crucial role of repair practices around the globe and is aimed at learning how repair is practiced and connects communities across the world.
Monthly Maintenance Sessions
Next session: September 16th at 2 PM EST
Monthly Maintenance Sessions is an accountability group for folks interested in accomplishing their maintenance tasks together. You can think of it as a “ study hall”, but for adults to accomplish your maintenance tasks. Set aside (at least) two hours in your calendar with us on the third Friday of each month from 2-4pm ET. This is a casual event, where participants join to share about their maintenance projects, and then do their maintenance projects quietly in community, together.
RECENT BLOG POSTS
An Interview with a Maintainer: Aaliyah Sweet P. Bailey
Aaliyah is a rural health and reproductive rights advocate, and in this interview, they discuss the care needed to maintain rural communities.
Meet the 2023 Movement Fellows
At the start of the fellowship, each 2023 Maintainers Movement Fellow shared a blog post about their perspectives and relationships to their fellowship track topics. Meet our amazing 2023 fellows below!
Himani Kulkarni: Exploring the maintenance of mental health networks
“To maintain what serves us, to repair what does not, and to renovate obsolete parts of ourselves into something that aligns more closely with who we are today, is one of the goals we set up in psychotherapy.”
Mathew Lubari: Journey to Repair Culture
“While repair and maintenance is relevant from the perspective of circular economy in developed societies, in the case of displacement settings or underdeveloped societies, it is a form of survival.”
Jennah Jones: The Circular Economy is a Collaborative Economy
“As my knowledge of the built environment grew, my studio projects became interventions for achieving environmental justice through adaptive reuse. They were imbued with interviews, ethnographic research, and design styles inspired by magical realism and community reslience.”
Terra Graziani: Maintaining Home, Abolishing Evictions
"As we remind ourselves of the importance of maintaining home, it is just as important to consider the systems, structures, and conditions of possibility that we want not to maintain, or rather, to abolish — every eviction, rent, private property, to name a few.”
UPCOMING OPPORTUNITIES
The Culture of Repair Project 2023 Grants
The Culture of Repair grants program provides funding and other resources to K-12 educators and advocates who are teaching not only hands-on technologies, but are also teaching the thinking skills, conceptual frameworks and mindset, and are cultivating the individual agency, that undergird a culture of repair.
Educopia Institute is Hiring!
The Program Officer for Sustainable Digital Infrastructures will be responsible for supporting Educopia’s portfolio of research, consulting, and community cultivation as it pertains to sustainable digital infrastructures.
Educopia’s long-term mission is to support collaborative communities in the production, preservation, and sharing of knowledge.
Request for Proposals: 2023 Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund
Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund is a multi-funder initiative by Ford Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Omidyar Network, Schmidt Futures and Open Collective sustaining a platform for researchers and practitioners to better understand how open digital infrastructure is built and deployed.
