REPAIR CAFES:

REPAIR CAFES: a way to repair not just stuff, but communities?

Speaker: Lindsay Cross, fmr director and founder, West End Refugee Service

What is a Repair Cafe? Repair Cafés are free meeting places and they’re all about repairing things (together). In the place where a Repair Café is located, you’ll find tools and materials to help you make any repairs you need. On clothes, furniture, electrical appliances, bicycles, crockery, appliances, toys, et cetera. You’ll also find expert volunteers, with repair skills in all kinds of fields.

Visitors bring their broken items from home. Together with the specialists they start making their repairs in the Repair Café. It’s an ongoing learning process. If you have nothing to repair, you can enjoy a cup of tea or coffee. Or you can lend a hand with someone else’s repair job. You can also get inspired at the reading table – by leafing through books on repairs and DIY.

There are over 2,500 Repair Cafés worldwide. Visit one in your area or start one yourself! See also the house rules we use at the Repair Café.

Why a Repair Café?

We throw away vast amounts of stuff. Even things with almost nothing wrong, and which could get a new lease on life after a simple repair. The trouble is, lots of people have forgotten that they can repair things themselves. Especially younger generations no longer know how to do that. Knowing how to make repairs is a skill quickly lost. This is a threat to a sustainable future and to the circular economy, in which raw materials can be reused again and again.

That’s why there’s a Repair Café! People with repair skills get the appreciation they deserve. Invaluable practical skills are passed on. Things are being used for longer and don’t have to be thrown away. This reduces the volume of raw materials and energy needed to make new products. It cuts CO2 emissions, for example, because manufacturing new products and recycling old ones causes CO2 to be released.

The Repair Café teaches people to see their possessions in a new light. And, once again, to appreciate their value. Repair Café volunteers also visit schools to give repair lessons. In both these ways, the Repair Café helps change people’s mindset. This is essential to kindle people’s enthusiasm for a sustainable society.

But most of all, the Repair Café just wants to show how much fun repairing things can be, and how easy it often is. Why don’t you give it a go?

From About Repair Café - Repairing for a Sustainable Future (repaircafe.org)

Who is sponsoring this and why?

The Café is sponsored by Jesmond United Reformed Church, with the Friends of Jesmond Library. Over the past year, we’ve engaged in community listening exercises and a ‘Futures Literacy’ session. What we heard was the need for improved community cohesion. We always think it’s best to have discussions around a table filled with good food, so we thought these ‘Big Questions Cafés’ might be a way to bring us all together. These cafés are offered up with no other expectation than for people to show up, share in a great meal together, and engage in discussion over big questions that help us identify what we can do together. There’s no charge as we see this as a ministry, but donations are gratefully accepted—just click the donations link when registering are contribute when you arrive.