Mending the world one zipper at a time at Broad Street Ministry

“It gets cold when your only coat has no buttons and the zipper is broken. It’s worse when you have no place to call home,” said John C., a man in his 50s who says he’s been living on the streets for a while. “So I went to the menders, and one of them fixed it.”

The menders is a group of about 16 women, most retired, who set up shop weekly on Thursdays in the large hall of the Broad Street Ministry, a multiservice organization on Broad Street between Spruce and Pine that serves people experiencing homelessness.

The menders’ tools include sturdy sewing machines; dozens of buttons, pins, and needles; and all sorts of threads and ribbons, ready to fix clothing items that need repair: pants, coats, shirts, and hoodies. And also a few backpacks.

They started their volunteer work almost 12 years ago and haven’t stopped, except for a break during the pandemic. They fix about 12 to 16 items a week in their two hours at the center.

Every Thursday morning, when the former church opens its doors, people waiting outside pass the front desk and are ushered into the main gathering hall. From there they can head to the lunch room, mail room, and community areas, or line up at the menders area.

On a recent day, Sue Becker, one of the more experienced menders, was the “intaker.”

She looked at the clothing people brought and quickly assessed whether the items could be repaired. “Do you want a button or a patch?” she asked one person. Later she told another that the item might be a bit difficult to fix, “but we’ll try.”

Becker usually discusses a plan of action with other menders, then hands a ticket number to the client. That information is entered in a work diary that reads almost like a captain’s log: torn pocket, rip in jacket, broken sleeve, straps in backpack, zipper on blue hoodie.

Ah, yes, zippers — the bane of every seamstress.

“Sometimes the best solution,” said mender Cecile Lefebvre Burgert as she negotiated a particularly difficult problem with an old zipper, “is to substitute the entire thing with Velcro straps.”

The goal for the menders is to be able to fix things fast and efficiently in their two hours.

A tall order for Beverly Coleman, a new mender, who ended up shortening a pair of pants for Ernest Jones in record time. “The fastest I’ve ever used my sewing machine. My experience took over,” she said with a laugh.

Pat Miller, one of the original menders and a former home economics teacher, started volunteering when she realized that she “was bothered by homelessness and wanted to do something about it.”

“People are so grateful,” she said, “and it’s such a small thing to do.”

It is a sentiment echoed by others in the group.

Last week, a man with a silky white Eagles jacket, a prized possession, wanted to make sure the repair of a big underarm rip would not show. He and the mender discussed at length the color of the thread. A half hour later when he picked up the vest, he was visibly pleased with the result.

Speaking of prized possessions, John Lohac showed up one morning with a hand-painted jacket made of pieces of thin multicolored leatherlike materials. The whole thing was in tatters. Helen Cunningham, one of the menders’ leaders and an experienced seamstress, took on the task.

Then she realized that the shawl Lohac had wrapped around his torso was all he had to wear above his pants. So she promptly wrote a voucher and asked one of her fellow volunteers to take him to the Ministry’s clothing boutique to get a shirt.

The menders service fits well with the overall mission of Broad Street Ministry, said CEO Laure Biron. “We like to say that we practice radical hospitality, which means that we provide social services for people who don’t have access to it.”

“They are our guests and we are here to serve their needs,” she said. “From a philosophical point of view, the menders provide healing and hope, and bring people together.”

Five years ago, in collaboration with Sister Mary Scullion’s Project Home, the menders opened another site in Hub of Hope, which is a social services center located in the underground labyrinthian hallways of the SEPTA concourse at Broad and Arch Streets. Among its services, the Hub offers showers and laundry facilities for people dealing with poverty and lack of housing. The menders are there once a week.

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Broad Street Ministry’s main hall is a beehive of activity at noon. Men and women head upstairs to eat in the sanctuary, where the old pews have been removed and replaced with dining tables. The cooks prepare 300 meals a day. Other clients stop by the mail room, where 4,700 people have made the Ministry their official address — which enables them, among other things, to register to vote.

Cunningham, who has been a mender since 2016 and trains a lot of new volunteers, made it clear that they’re not social workers.

“We are not equipped to evaluate needs or provide solutions. Others do that here,” she said. “We just fix clothes, give people small sewing kits and often some backpacks. We do alterations as much as repairs.”

“The array of people who stop by is enormous,” Cunningham added. “Sometimes we are dealing with the working poor, or people with little money, people confronting loneliness, added to home and food insecurity. We try to be the people of ‘yes.’”

It costs about $2,000 to buy the sewing machines, kits, and storage equipment, so ideally, Cunningham added, it would be great if menders programs would open in additional sites.

“We’ll gladly train them and we are always looking for volunteers who know how to sew,” she said. (Anyone who is interested can email Larry Downey at larryd@broadstreetministry.org.)

Why do all this?

“It fills up your human bank account,” Cunningham said.

“There’s a lot of camaraderie. Somehow restoring something to be used again gives lots of us great satisfaction.”

The other menders would agree.