Sandra Goldmark

Sandra Goldmark first got involved in the climate space because of her love for theatrical design, rooted in her fascination with drawing, painting, storytelling, history, and the tangibility of set design. In her career, she noticed the amount of waste inherent in throwing away scenery, leading her to change her theatrical design process in 2010 to include reuse, repair, and sustainable sourcing. She then started pop-up repair shops around NYC, called Fixup, and has since then written “Fixation,” a book on the circular economy; started the Barnard Sustainability Office; and has joined the Columbia Climate School. She calls herself an educator, designer, and expert on the circular economy.

Sandra Goldmark 

Associate Dean for Interdisciplinary Engagement at the Columbia Climate School and Professor of Professional Practice at Barnard College

Inwood, Manhattan

Q&A

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

In your TED talk, you shared that the idea for the Fixup Repair Shop came to you one night while you were up with your second newborn. Could talk a bit more about that epiphany, and the decision to go forward with it? 

I got obsessed with the notion that I was surrounded by waste, and clutter, during that time when Eric was newborn. I would wake up in the middle of the night with this frenzied feeling that somehow turned into this idea that “My god, I’ve got to open a repair shop.” I remember waking up to feed the baby, then being unable to fall back asleep and designing logos or posting crowdfunding updates on my laptop in the middle of the night. So, with that particular project I was especially driven, and I don't know exactly why. Maybe it was the fact that I did have maternity leave, so I had a little space and time (even if it was at weird hours) to confront the waste and carelessness in my industry. And maybe it was having another child, and just feeling, with two little children, “I can't keep living this way.” You know, maybe having children [she has two] made taking action on climate more urgent, for me. And then I've also always been a person trained in theater to just start: that taking action to open a repair shop piece didn't feel foreign to me at all; it felt like the beginning of designing a show. You have a little idea and you just start to put pencil to paper and take one step after the other. 

Do you have any advice for people who are not as used to taking action, and how they should go about doing that?

I would say, just do something small and then keep doing a little bit every day. The other powerful tool for me in taking action is to talk about it with people – to kind of go public, maybe a little bit before you're ready – can help give you a feeling of accountability, and support, and motivation. Or just speak up: raise your hand in class or in your weekly staff meeting and ask the question about how your organization is tackling climate. Start being that squeaky wheel – that’s a very small, easy first step.

Could you talk more about the process of expanding Fixup, the repair service you started? 

In the beginning, we thought we would just do one three week shop, as a research experiment or a strange kind of performance – backstage theatre kids “playing” repair shop, to see what would happen. But we really struck a nerve, and people really seemed to want the service, so we had this great period of early growth where we realized that this was not just a one-off project, and that we could do multiple pop ups. And we kept growing and learning for several years. But then we got to a certain size and I reached a crossroads: to go to the next stage I would have had to quit my job (which I considered, but it felt very tough with two kids and a mortgage), and I would have needed to raise serious money. And so that was a really difficult moment that ultimately led to me stopping the [repair] shops, writing the book, and kind of moving on to the next phase. But that was very hard, because I was so passionate about what we were doing, and I believed, and really still believe, that there is an exciting and necessary future for repair as a business model in the modern world.

Could you talk more about your book and the importance of a circular economy?

The book followed the repair shops. As I said, I felt “Okay, I have this choice in front of me. I either have to quit my job in higher ed and become a repair shop owner slash entrepreneur full time, or I can take these learnings from these seven years of running these repair shops and move on to a new chapter of telling the story, trying to mobilize others and help build what I called the “stuff movement.”  And so that's the path I chose. I don't know if it was the right or wrong path – who knows. Writing a book, for me, was a huge challenge. I was a theatrical set designer. But it felt really good to tell the story of that work and I hope and pray that it is a little piece in the overall path toward a much bigger circular economy, or at the very least I hope that somebody out there who's trying to start a repair business can read that book and learn something from it. 

All of nature is built on a circular system, and it's only our species that creates waste products that don't get fed back into another production cycle. When you start to think about resources being extracted from the Earth and the habitat destruction and biodiversity loss associated with all of those land use changes, circularity, to me, starts to become more and more obvious and necessary. Circularity is not only about reducing waste; it brings opportunities for job creation, for greater community resilience, and for that hotly debated dream – sustainable economic growth. Sometimes I think I sound like a crazy person, but in many ways, I think circularity is as close to the Holy Grail as you can get in the climate solutions space.

Would your advice be to get things repaired instead of throwing them away? And what is your advice to adhere to a circular economy?

Another thing I love about the circular economy is it works at every scale. So if you're an individual and you feel crappy about your consumption patterns, starting right now you can make a commitment to always try to source something used before you buy it new. Or to do what we did here in Barnard Theater, which is split our materials budget into 50% for new materials and 50% for used goods, if you're an organization. You can set some clear reuse targets and say we're going to spend X dollars less on new goods and move those dollars into used goods or refurbishment or local labor. If you're running a business, you can think about how you could create a business model that is not based on extraction of new resources, for example, if you're selling a product, could you sell used instead of new. These are simple examples, but circularity can start small. 

What scares you most about the climate crisis?

We're not making the changes, writ large, that we need to. And the “we” in that sentence is many individuals, many organizations, especially in the United States right now. A lot of people are working hard, and a lot of progress has been made, but it’s not enough, and that’s what scares me.

Yeah, it's definitely the mindset of “does my singular action even matter”? And I struggle with that even with my parents, because I signed them up for composting in my town but they aren’t the best at remembering to do it. 

It's a complicated question. For me, it's so clear that individual actions matter – that they add up. I'm not saying your parents' composting is going to fix the problem, but, to me, it matters. For one thing, it's that many more pounds of compost that are going to get collected. For another, it is part of creating a social norm in their neighborhood. And for me, personally, those types of simple actions actually make me feel better – as long as they are not the only thing I’m working on. Little actions make me feel like at least I'm doing this little thing today, they remind me of the bigger project, and they help keep me focussed. But I understand and respect that a lot of people in my own friends and family as well sometimes question, does this matter? We can't wait for individual families to each have a revelation. We can't hope for everybody to become personally galvanized. It's not going to happen. But we also can’t denigrate people’s small actions, and we do need those cadres of first movers who are going to start by composting and then also help push for policy changes, for organizational change, and new cultural norms.

Was there a moment – or, I guess, breaking point – that drove you to the climate space? 

I got very frustrated with the theater industry around the time my kids were born, maybe 2010 or so. , I felt like nobody cared. I remember I was in a meeting, and I said, “Well, maybe we should, you know, choose a different material for the flooring, because this material we're talking about is kind of toxic, and we could just use something else.” And I remember a person on the creative team kind of rolled his eyes and said, “ “Oh, so tiresome.” And I shot back, “Well, it won't be tiresome when you're canoeing to work in Midtown.” 

He was actually a wonderful person, and I really like him, but I felt like: how could you not care? How could this be tiresome? And I had many little moments like that with many, many other people in the industry, and at Barnard. And it made me so upset and angry that that was a real galvanizing moment. Luckily, the theater industry is really beginning to change and be more attuned to the crisis. Maybe I was one of the first crazy guys dancing in the field (I’m referring to this great video called First Follower about how movements start). Sometimes it takes a minute for other people to join, and that's okay. 

Who are your mentors and inspirations in the field?

My colleagues at the Climate School are so inspiring to me. In particular, I’ve learned so much from Ruth DeFries there. In theatre, Donyele Werle was a very early inspiration – she was really the first crazy guy dancing in the field – in the U.S. in terms of theatrical design. Gail Beltrone was the director of Campus Services here at Barnard when I started the sustainability office, and she had done a lot of work ahead of me. 

Finally, my father is an inspiration, both in terms of working in the climate space and in terms of being willing to take on new professional challenges and roles. He worked in state and city government, foundations, newspapers, and his last chapter in his career has been focused on climate and sustainability. He was also an early mover. I have two sisters; all three of us, I remember, were in the car one day (I was maybe 10, so this was 1985 or so) and my dad said to us, “You know, girls, one of you should really become a climatologist. This is going to be a really important topic as you grow up, and I hope that one of you takes it on.” We all rolled our eyes, of course. I did not become a climatologist, but lo and behold, here we are, almost 40 years later, and I'm working in the climate space. He really called it in that car – it is, I think, the most important topic, and I’m so glad he helped me take it on.