John Wackman

JOHN WACKMAN founded the first Repair Cafe in New York State and now describes his role as that of coordinator, communicator, and cheerleader for Repair Cafes in the Hudson Valley, Catskills, and Capital District of New York, as well as for the repair movement globally. He has participated in Repair Cafes in the Netherlands and co-presented with Martine Postma at the Drawdown Learn Conference at Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York. He has presented on community repair at the New York and New Jersey Library Associations’ annual conferences and led a statewide webinar for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. He serves on the board of Sustainable Hudson Valley and is a commissioner for the City of Kingston Climate Smart Commission. John is a recipient of an Environmental Protection Agency Environmental Champion Award. For nearly three decades, John wrote and produced programming for public television and national cable networks to encourage strength and creativity within communities. With Lightworks Producing Group in New York, he worked on many specials and series, and executive produced the civil rights documentaries You Don’t Have to Ride Jim Crow! and Here Am I, Send Me: The Journey of Jonathan Daniels. For PBS, he created, with host Mary Ann Esposito, the cooking series Ciao Italia, still in production and the longest-running cooking series on television.