Celebrating Earth Month!!
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Rachel Tieger, TEAC Co Chair

We will be hosting community events all month long, and into May,  in honor of Earth Day (April 22). There will be opportunities for people of all ages to get involved, explore our villages and help our local environment.

Join us for our Native Seeds Giveaway, Trail-Blaze, first Repair Cafe, Village-wide Clean Up, Garden Work, Invasive Plant Identification Hike, Local story time, Movie Night, Clothing and Housewares Swap, Bird Walk, and MORE. See our website for more information or sign up here. Mom’s Organic Market from Dobbs Ferry will be providing fresh organic fruit for volunteers at some of the events.

The Swap events and Repair Cafe are part of our “Zero Waste” efforts to reduce how much stuff goes into the waste stream and to try to reverse the throw-away mentality, one beloved item at a time. The Household and Clothing Swap is a huge “give and take”, where people donate usable items in good shape and then “shop” for new treasures to bring home. 

Other ways to celebrate Earth Month:

• Take the plastic free challenge for the month of April and tag #plasticfreechallenge. 

• Shop locally! Check out the downtown areas of Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow for lots of new cool shops, and visit the TaSH farmers market on the 2nd and 4th Saturday

• Carry a trash bag and disposable gloves  to pick up litter on your daily walks

• Reduce animal products, enjoy Meatless Mondays or adopt a Plant Based diet. See our easy monthly recipe below.

• Homeowners can join Gridrewards and/or schedule a free energy audit to reduce energy 

• Walk, ride your bike or take public transportation more often

• Encourage others to incorporate more sustainable practices in their lifestyle

Repair Cafes are community events where volunteer repair coaches from your town help fix your beloved but broken items for free.

The concept of a repair café was dreamed up by Martine Postma of Amsterdam in 2009. New Paltz resident John Wackman saw a NYT articleabout the repair cafes in the Netherlands and was so intrigued by them he flew to Amsterdam to see how they worked. The first New Paltz Repair Café was held in 2013, exactly 10 years ago, and with it was born Repair Café Hudson Valley (RCHV), a consortium of repair cafes now over 40 strong throughout the Hudson Valley, Catskills and Capital Region.

I first heard of a repair café back in 2019 when I saw a post on Facebook for volunteers to help at a newly founded Hastings Repair Café. The concept grabbed me, so I reached out from Irvington. Lindsey Taylor and Ariella Gastel were happy to have me join their café as a jewelry repair coach and told me that they hoped to one day grow into a Rivertowns Repair Café.



Since then, we’ve held several busy cafes in Hastings, one in Dobbs, one in Irvington and now we are thrilled to be adding a ‘TarryHollow’ joint TT/SH café to our list of cafes.

In fact, I too fell so in love with the repair café concept, that I ended up taking a job as the coordinator for all the RCHV cafes. Now, I travel almost every Saturday to a different area to meet the many café organizers and repair coaches, where I repair jewelry for so many grateful people. It truly is the best job in the world--everyone is so happy to be at a café.

There is so much joy in the process of putting on an event that not only helps save things from the wastestream, but also brings communities together—something that has become crucially important as we figure out how to be together again post-pandemic.

But we’re also doing something more—we’re creating a culture shift.

We are learning to not just throw things away and then get on Amazon to buy new ones. Instead, we’re putting them aside until the next repair café or even looking up a video on Youtube to see if we can fix them ourselves. Together, we are transforming our throwaway society into one that prioritizes buying less and recycling, reusing, reducing and repairing more.

If you would like to learn more about RCHV or repair cafes or get something fixed, please stop by the TarryHollow Repair Café coming up on Saturday, April 15th, 10am–2pm at the Neighborhood House in Tarrytown or email us at tarryhollowrepaircafe@gmail.com, fromer@sustainhv.org or visit www.repaircafehv.org.

Earth Month got off to a great start this year when Tarrytown Mayor Karen Brown took action to save monarch butterflies and other pollinators by signing the National Wildlife Federation’s Mayors Monarch Pledge in late March.