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BARC – Bay Area Repair Coalition

GOAT is assembling a local coalition of organizations and people who work directly doing repair, refurbishing, and reuse for wheelchairs, powerchairs, and other assistive tech in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We’re including nonprofits, businesses, independent repairers, wheelchair users who are into DIY, and volunteers who work directly with wheelchair repair. We’re also including related repair businesses who have relevant skills, like bike repair collectives, fabrication labs and maker spaces, and machinists who are interested in this work.

Bay Area Repair Resources
This guide from the CIL is very useful!
Mobility Repair Services in the Bay Area

August 2026 meeting

Our first in person meeting was August 7th, 2026 in Berkeley at the Ed Roberts Campus, 12:30pm to 4:30pm. 

We had around 25 participants for an afternoon of lively conversation! Participants included independent hackers and inventors, local fabrication lab The Mendery, and people from orgs like CIL, MELP, ReCares, Able Closet, CRIL, GOAT, and local transit accessibility agencies.

Our conference was sponsored by the Open Source Hardware Association, which paid for food and for some travel (for Erik to fly out for our build day). And by the CIL, which kindly helped us to reserve the conference room in the Ed Roberts Campus for the day (Thanks Victor and Medyna!).

three wheelchair users in discussion in a conference room
Ian, Corbett, and Ralf

Photos: https://www.flickr.com/photos/lizhenry/albums/72177720335150575/

Here are some ideas for action that came up during the discussion.

  • Tours of each other’s spaces
  • Community Backups
    Community members agree to be decentralized storage. BARC has a tracking system so we know where the chairs are kept. For our “working but not placed” chairs but could also be for people’s backup chair that they can’t store.

  • A website for requests.
    a person puts in their city, and then has a checkbox to consent for their request to be visible to all the BARC orgs.
    Could we use ReCares’ system of Google forms? For both DME requested and available for donation.

  • Working with MTC;
    treating our needs as part of transit

  • Assuaging liability fears
    Waivers or some boilerplate legal templates to ameliorate potential repairers’ liability worries. Legal support.

  • High demand for rollators.
    Could we start a program to get more rollators out there in lieu of the low end rollators people get at the hospital?

  • Medical establishment
    Ways we could work with local hospitals/rehab/OTs? Kaiser?

  • Ongoing training for simple DIY maintenance. Videos, posts, email newsletter, physical magazine, workshops. Zines, handouts?
  • Putting together “actually useful” manuals from owners’ and service manuals.
  • Mailing list: We can use https://groups.google.com/a/openassistivetech.org/g/BARC

    Invited orgs:

    Open Source Wheelchair Build Day!

    On our second day, Sat. Aug 8, a group of builders and inventors met at GOAT space to discuss open source wheelchairs, with guest speakers Erik Kondo, Ralf Hotchkiss, Corbett O’Toole, and Dana Schwachman. We spent all day and built an open source wheelchair from a design from https://opensourcewheelchairs.org.

    Two manual wheelchair users pose together, arms and wheels linked
    Erik Kondo and Ralf Hotchkiss
    crew of people pointing happily at a just assembled wheelchair made from PVC pipe
    We are all punch drunk and very happy the chair took shape after a day of hard work!