Welcome to Repair Café! By setting up a Repair Café in your town or city, you can actively contribute to a more sustainable society. You can help create a society where everyone can find a place, where repair expertise is cherished and passed on, and where valuable raw materials are used in a responsible way. It's fun, you meet people from the neighbourhood and you also help the environment!
- Martine Postma, Founder of Repair Café
The Idea
We throw away vast amounts of stuff - stuff which could get a new lease of life after a simple repair. Lots of people have forgotten that they can repair things themselves or they no longer know how. Repair Cafés are free meeting places where people come together to repair things together. In a local Repair Café, you’ll find tools and materials to help you ma...
We throw away vast amounts of stuff - stuff which could get a new lease of life after a simple repair. Lots of people have forgotten that they can repair things themselves or they no longer know how. Repair Cafés are free meeting places where people come together to repair things together. In a local Repair Café, you’ll find tools and materials to help you make any repairs you need on clothes, furniture, electrical appliances, bicycles, crockery, appliances, toys, etc. You'll also find expert volunteers, with repair skills in all kinds of fields. Visitors bring their broken items from home and in the Repair Café, they start making their repairs with the specialists. It’s an ongoing learning process.
Repair Cafés help people in the community whose skills may not always be valued to get involved again. It helps neighbours from different backgrounds connect with each other and allows valuable practical knowledge to be shared. Repairing things at a Repair Cafe means 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.
"Thank you all the extraordinary people who support this brilliant venue! We cannot afford to lose the practical skills that are the underpinnings of our society. It is also a wonderful venue to make friends, learn valuable skills and be a vital part of our social fabric. Kudos!"
- Cheryl Curtis, Repair Café organiser
What you can do You can start your own Repair Café and bring people in your community together to repair things, find out all you need to know in our 5 step guide or you can join your local group.
How to get involved
Time:
As a Repair Café local organiser you will need about 4 hours a week to get your Café up and running, a full day to run your first Café and then 2 hours a week to maintain the group and organise subsequent Cafés.
If there is no Repair Café in your area we can help you to start one. Just register your interest here and we'll guide you through the whole process of organising your own Repair Café.
Links