Meet Ireland’s Starters – Toby Steele from the Repair Café Bray

In the “Meet our Starters” series we invite people who start new ideas in their communities to share their stories with the ChangeX community: What gets them excited about an idea, how are they hoping it will benefit the community, how do they make it happen.

Toby Steele started the first Repair Café in Bray, County Wicklow in partnership with Common Ground. They held their first Café in July 2017 and the second in January 2018, where eight volunteers helped out and about 25-30 people brought things to be fixed.

1. From your own perspective: What is the Repair Café all about?

It’s about trying to positively push against the culture of disposability – as a society it has become the norm to throw something away as soon as it breaks or begins to wear out; when in many cases a bit of effort and ingenuity can bring it back to life and give it years more use. Repair Café is all about helping people to do this, raising awareness that you can, and passing on the skills to allow people to do this themselves.

2. Why a Repair Café? There are lots of ideas out there to start, lots of initiatives going on at Common Ground Bray . Why did you choose to get behind the Repair Café?

Reducing waste was something close to my heart, and Common Ground is an amazingly fertile place to get ideas off the ground. I suggested the idea of a Repair Cafe the first time I went to a meeting there, and was immediately encouraged and helped to start it up.

3. What’s the difference you are hoping to make by running a Repair Café?

I feel that a lot of positive change for the world needs to be from the ground up – I don’t think big businesses will change their ways to become more sustainable until they see their customers making choices based on sustainability and reducing environmental impact. To me the Repair Café, and Common Ground in general, is about raising awareness, getting people to think about sustainability, and building a community of like-minded people who are concerned about the impact they are having on the world.

4. Tell us about something that surprised you after hosting the first one?

It was nowhere near as scary to do as I had expected. I had been very nervous before the first one, in case no-one turned up, or that something could go wrong. But with the help and advice I got from my Repair Cafe mentor, and from the RepairCafe.org information, it went off fairly smoothly.

5. Tell us a bit about what was happening at the first Repair Café. Who volunteered, what kind of items got repaired, what were reactions from people joining?

I managed to rope in some friends who had great skills in some of the repair areas, and then asked around for help for some of the other skills I was looking for. I found that people were very happy to help if they had the time. At both events we’ve had General Household Repairs, Clothing and Textiles, Computer Software, Woodwork and Furniture, Jewellery, and Knife Sharpening. Having now held two I think it is definitely something that takes a couple of events to get into its stride. I feel people needed to see the event happening to get an idea of what it was all about, and that people who’d seen the first event were then clued up and ready to bring items for repair at the second one. And definitely using the power of social media to get the message out there was a big help in generating publicity.

6. Is there a motto, a quote, a belief that you love and that drives you to just get things done?

‘He not busy being born is busy dying’ from the song ‘It’s alright ma’ by Bob Dylan. I think it is very true, and regularly inspires me to push myself outside my comfort zone.

7. Which other ideas would you like to see in your community and why?

A concerted effort to persuade food-chain suppliers to reduce plastic packaging and to completely remove non-recylable and single-use packaging.

See photos below of the repairs taking place at the Repair Café on 27th January in Common Ground, Bray