There is a kind of love called maintenance.
Q4 2023: End of Year Fellowship Panel, Blog Posts and more!
Dear Maintainers,
We hope this note finds you as well as possible!
It’s been great to connect with many of you at our virtual events this fall-season, and we hope to connect with many more of you through a few more events in this last quarter of 2023. As we approach the year's end, we want to share our appreciation for an incredible journey with our outstanding Movement Fellows of 2023: Mathew, Jennah, Himani, and Terra. On December 6th, we are inviting all of you to join us for the End of Fellowship Panel, where we will celebrate what they have all accomplished in these past months, as well as talk about what we can anticipate in their upcoming landscape scan reports. For those curious about the Maintainers Fellows' experiences, we invite you to submit your questions for them (instructions below!)
Looking ahead to 2024 fills us with enthusiasm and gratitude as we announce that The Maintainers has secured follow-on funding for the year, from to the generosity of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. We are thrilled to carry forward our movement of maintenance, care, and repair into 2024, we are enormously grateful for the foundation's trust and support in us.
Thank you to all of you for making our work possible.
Take care,
The Maintainers
UPCOMING VIRTUAL EVENTS
End of Fellowship Panel
December 6, 2023 | 9am EST (East Coast USA) | Zoom
Join the 2023 Maintainers Movement Fellows for an End of Fellowship Panel to hear about their experience throughout the year! In this upcoming panel, the 2023 Maintainers Movement Fellows— Jennah Jones, Himani Kulkarni, Mathew Lubari, and Terra Graziani— will showcase their impactful work and review how they have uniquely approached their fellowship, as well as discuss their experience coming together and creating a unique virtual space. Together, we will reflect on how the fellowship, the relationships built through it, and how the larger community of The Maintainers Network can contribute to building a more caring and well-maintained world.
In order to engage our community in these reflections, we invite you to participate in the panel discussion by submitting your questions through this form.
December Maintenance Sessions
Last session of the year: Friday, December 15 from 2–4p ET
Our Monthly Maintenance Sessions are 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 two hours in your calendar with us on the third Friday of each month from 2–4pm ET on zoom.
We’d love to hear what you thought about this first year of Monthly Maintenance Sessions! Fill out this feedback form to share your thoughts with us.
RECENT BLOG POSTS
An Interview with a Maintainer: Vincent Lai
Vincent Lai has been a longtime Fixer Collective leader for the past decade and a dedicated member of the maintenance and repair community. In this conversation, Vincent reflected on the value of community-building and self-sufficiency through fixing, and also, how being able to repair your belongings can bring purpose and a more meaningful level of ownership towards the everyday objects we use.
Love and Maintenance
Last fall, students in the Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology (CADS) program at Leiden University, started working together to hone our fieldwork skills in self-directed ethnographic research projects on maintenance. Taking inspiration from U.A. Fanthorpe’s poem “Atlas”, which defines maintenance as “the sensible side of love,” we started from a broad understanding of maintenance and the kinds of social activities and roles it may involve.
Atlas by U. A. Fanthorpe
There is a kind of love called maintenance
Which stores the WD40 and knows when to use it;
Which checks the insurance, and doesn’t forget
The milkman; which remembers to plant bulbs;
Which answers letters; which knows the way
The money goes; which deals with dentists
And Road Fund Tax and meeting trains,
And postcards to the lonely; which upholds
The permanently ricketty elaborate
Structures of living, which is Atlas.
And maintenance is the sensible side of love,
Which knows what time and weather are doing
To my brickwork; insulates my faulty wiring;
Laughs at my dryrotten jokes; remembers
My need for gloss and grouting; which keeps
My suspect edifice upright in air,
As Atlas did the sky.
Do you have a maintainer you’d like to interview? A maintenance project that you’d like to highlight? Musings on maintenance? Learn how to pitch a guest blogpost:
Submit your idea for a #MaintainersSpotlight or Guest Blog post usingthis form, and learn more about the project by clicking the button below. If you have any questions, do not hesitate in reaching out to liliana@themaintainers.org.
Thank you to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
The Maintainers and Educopia are proud to announce an additional award from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The Alfred P.Sloan Foundation has been a champion of The Maintainers for many years, and thanks to their generosity, we have been able to convene extraordinary fellow, foster knowledge-sharing, build a model of interdisciplinary collaboration, host free virtual events, amplify grassroots maintenance initiatives, design community initiatives, and continue to evolve our project model in the years to come. We extend our heartfelt gratitude to the Foundation for being instrumental in shaping the future of programs and initiatives, and are excited for what is to come in 2024.
Stay tuned for additional updates about 2024 programming from The Maintainers.