Sandra Goldmark
CIRCULARITY EXPERT, PROFESSOR, SPEAKER, AUTHOR
Associate Dean, Columbia University Climate School
Professor of Professional Practice, Barnard College
Sandra Goldmark is an entre- and intra-preneur of regenerative and circular climate responses. Sandra serves as Associate Dean for Engagement and Impact at the Columbia Climate School, and Professor of Professional Practice at Barnard College. Rooted in her training as a theatrical designer, Sandra leverages radical collaboration to build bold new programs and lead nimble, effective teams. From 2013-2019, Sandra founded and operated Fixup, a social enterprise repair service dedicated to healthy and circular patterns of consumption. Sandra is a co-creator of the Sustainable Production Toolkit, a free climate action and sustainability resource for performing arts organizations, and serves on the Board of Hudson Valley Shakespeare.
Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, MSNBC, the BBC, The Sunday Times of London, The Daily News, Salon.com, and many more. Sandra is the author of Fixation: How to Have Stuff without Breaking the Planet.
841: Sandra Goldmark, part 1: Fixation: How to Have Stuff without Breaking the Planet
How often does something break that you know could be fixed, but you don’t know how and there are no places to fix it? I remember repair stores all over the place, but the field doesn’t exist any more. We all know about planned obsolescence and how products are designed to break. Now we feel we have to throw things away and replace them (after avoiding buying things when possible, which is far more than most of us practice).
Enter Sandra Goldmark, as a member of a growing movement to fix things and make things fixable. She’s also an Ivy League professor at Barnard and the Columbia Climate School, so, no, professors don’t have to be out of touch.
I met Sandra before the pandemic, at a shop she set up down by the South Street Seaport to repair things. Besides her own book Fixation, she was mentioned in a book (The Repair Revolution) in my sustainability leadership workshop alumni book club.
Lest you think people have to be born fixers or educated as engineers, a preconception that I find still holds me back, she shares her background not growing up with those things. On the contrary, she found she enjoyed it and found community.
Listen for a basic human approach to fixing things and changing culture.