On the 15th of every month, Michael Swaine trundles into San Francisco’s Tenderloin district with a cart-mounted sewing machine—the old-fashioned kind, which you can only operate by means of a treadle. Setting up shop on a street corner, as he has done so for the past 12 years, Swaine offers his services as a tailor, mending whatever clothing the neighborhood’s residents bring him for free. A performance artist, an inventor, and a professor of ceramics at the California College of Arts, Swaine sees opportunities for change everywhere. Among his larger ambitions is the construction of a free “mending library,” a place for “fixing the holes in our lives…to borrow thread and sewing machines and talk about life.”

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