Last October, our Repair Café joined in the international birthday celebrations for the Repair Café movement. It was great that our Haregate event took place almost to the day of the movement’s 15th birthday. The world’s first repair café was held by Dutch journalist Martine Postma in the Hague on 18 October, 2009. Since then, the movement has spread around the world.
The Moorlands Repair Café came a bit later, being launched on 5 March, 2022 but, to be fair, MCA had only been going for less than three years. Since then, it has gone from strength to strength and this summer went on tour with events in Cheadle and Warslow.
At our most recent Repair Café at the Foxlowe this November, the team were joined by filmmakers from Staffs County Council to record a short video and also by Gemma from Waste Savvy Staffordshire, who launched the Rescue Me project. This was their first pop up stall, where there was a huge range of toys, baby items, books, pictures, mirrors and bric-a-brac, all rescued from the household recycling centre. These were available for donations, which all went straight to Leek Food Bank.
The Repair Café has been the brainchild of our coordinator, Mike Jones (pictured here with grandson, Alfie), aided by a dedicated team of expert repairers and admin volunteers. He’s now busy organising new venues for next year, in addition to our regular Foxlowe and Haregate ones. Watch this space and their Facebook page!
MCA had a great day at Biddulph Moor CORE's amazing Apple Day, where all things appley were celebrated.
Not just a stall pressing apples into juice from us, but also children's activities around greenhouse gases and a Repair Cafe stall focussing on bikes.
We gave them a challenge with this one but it seems to have failed its MOT test.
Looking forward to seeing what turns up at the next regular Repair Cafe.
Word cloud generated from ‘3 little words’ provided by Repair Cafe volunteers explaining what Repair Café means to them.
If you’d like a summary of what the Repair Cafes have been achieving during the past year, here’s their annual report. It seems amazing that it was only recently launched, as it’s become such an important part of our lives. Find out all the lowdown on numbers and types of repairs and get a sneak preview of plans for expansion.
The next Repair Café will be at the Foxlowe on Saturday 20 May.
Our Repair Cafes are going from strength to strength, with increasing numbers of visitors and more and more skilled repairers. We are hugely grateful to them all.
However, we’re still looking for people to help with our social media, video and publicity - can you spare a couple of hours a month? We’d like to make 2023 an even greater year of growth, as there certainly is a need for our services. If you can help you would be made very welcome in our friendly group.
The totals for our 4 Repair Cafes from August to November have now been confirmed....
After a couple of pilot events at Haregate Community Centre and the Foxlowe Arts Centre, we're delighted to report that the Repair Cafe programme is now up and running, with quite a few happy punters taking away beautifully mended objects. These range from mended clothes to a clothes line pole to televisions. Repairs aren't always possible but we can refer owners to professional repairers in the area. The television shown here couldn't be mended but one of our volunteers gave the young couple her recently replaced TV - an example of true community spirit.
These events run once a month, alternating between the two venues.
Our plans to set up a Repair Cafe are progressing well - we have had 2 meetings now with over 20 people attending and have already been successful in a couple of grant applications. We are pleased that 3 people have come forward to be PAT testers for electrical items, and now we have had it confirmed that we will receive £500 from County Councillor Charlotte Atkin's Climate Action fund, we can crack on and get the PAT unit purchased and the 3 people get the certification we need for our insurance. We are also grateful for District Councillor Lyn Swindlehurst's grant from her Councillors' Community Initiative Fund. She's also proved herself pretty nifty with a needle and thread when repairing the trimming on Leek Town Crier Bill Lomas's hat.