Welcome our 2025 Maintainers Impact Fellows!
The Maintainers Impact Fellowship is an award that aims to advance the movement for maintenance thinking and action, by uplifting individuals who are leading initiatives of maintenance, repair, and care within their communities.
The two fellows will implement a discrete impact project within a 3 month time frame (January 6 – April 7). The impact project advances and celebrates maintenance, repair, and/or care practices while addressing tangible challenges or opportunities to strengthen public or social infrastructures within the fellow’s local context.
Join us in welcoming our new cohort of for 2025:
Ana K. Celis is an Archaeologist working in the preservation of the natural and cultural heritage of caves in southern Mexico. In 2022, she founded Karst Lab Mexico, to provide local assistance to small-scale communities regarding the management and conservation of tourist caves. As a Maintainers Fellow, Ana will integrate the idea of rock formation repair into cave maintenance. This effort will focus on the mineral deposits called speleothems, which are constantly threatened by development and human activities. Ana has partnered with the Cave Formation Repair Project (CFRP), a U.S.-base movement originated in 1986, to foster repair practices in the caves of the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. In August 2024, Ana became a Fulbright Scholar (Hubert H. Humphrey Program) hosted at UC Davis from where she is currently fostering international collaborations to advance the management and conservation of Mexican caves.
Impact Project: In the Yucatán Peninsula, cave formations are permanently being threatened by development and tourism activities. The word dzonot, is a Mayan word that describes a cavern filled with water, and has become familiar in the vocabulary around caves and the overall underground space. These places have become worldwide known for their scientific, cultural and aesthetic values. This project aims to create a community of practice around cave repair of mineral formations in Yucatán – which involves drilling holes in many of the broken formations to insert stainless steel all-threads which reinforce epoxied joints- while also building Karst Lab México’s capacity through a partnership with the Cave Formation Repair Project, culminating in a co-organized Speleothem Repair Workshop in March 2025.
Gabriele Ferri is an Assistant Professor at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). His work explores the intersection of Design Justice and Transforming Practices, focusing on the intended and unintended consequences of design. With an emphasis on bottom-up processes, the right to repair, and climate justice, Gabriele collaborates with communities to challenge systemic injustice and co-create equitable alternatives. Frustrated by the unsustainable cycle of production, consumption, and disposal, he advocates for practices that prioritize care, repair, and extending the “long life” of design artifacts.
Impact Project: The Emilia-Romagna region in Italy, including Bologna, has faced severe flooding in May 2023, September 2024, and October 2024. These events have caused fatalities, significant damage, and displacement. Gabriele Ferri’s will organize Climate Café Bologna, five climate cafes, inspired by repair cafés, to foster informal, community-oriented spaces for sharing experiences and solutions. This project will be dedicated to documenting, adapting, and sharing community-driven practices that enhance climate resilience and recovery to territories damaged by flooding. These gatherings aim to capture and synthesize grassroots practices of adaptation, care, maintenance, and self-organization so that the Climate Café model can be adapted to other localities affected by climate disaster.
Thank you to our fellows for the excellent work they do in creating a better-maintained world! We are so grateful for the support of VR (Ex) Change in funding the fellowship awards, as well as the ongoing support of our funders of Siegel Family Endowment that resource our operations costs.