Repair Café
Repair Cafés are voluntary meetings where participants repair their broken items alone or together with others.
Initiative phase: Well established and running
The Repair Café is a meeting place where people can repair their clothes, bicycles, toys, electronic devices (computers, irons, etc.) and much more. Volunteers provide tools and their experience to help participants repair their items. If they don't have anything to fix, they just have a cup of coffee or tea, or help someone else with the repair. The Repair Café embodies 3 basic aspects: 1. ecological aspect, by reducing waste 2. social aspect, by bringing together people who might never have met 3. the educational aspect (teaching people how to repair appliances themselves).
The network:
In order to ensure a sustainable design of the Repair Cafés in Luxembourg, a network of small local groups is established. This favours shorter journeys for helpers and visitors, the exchange of neighbours and neighbouring communities and offers the national Repair Café movement contacts with other groups and helpers to support each other.
So far, since February 2021, 15 local groups have emerged across Luxembourg that, after initial guidance and support from our project, are able to run autonomous Repair Cafés.
The municipalities, as well as the nature parks and other organisations, support the groups in their implementation with premises, catering and organisation.
Name of Organization
- Repair Café Lëtzebuerg
- repaircafe@cell.lu
- www.repaircafe.lu
- www.repairtogether.be www.repaircafe.org
Address & geo
- Repair Café
Contact person
- Sarah Haas
- repaircafe@cell.lu
Participation opportunities
Engaged citizen Full time volunteers Part time volunteers Strong arms Expertise/knowledge A room An open space A gardenInstitution type/carrier
Non-profit organisation
Institution-Name
Repair Café Lëtzebuerg asbl
How is your initiative financed?
The coordination of the initiative is financed by the Ministry of Environment, Climate and Sustainable Development. The local Repair Café group Atert-Wark is financed by additional funding from LEADER Atert-Wark. Here, further training and wer
Participation opportunities
The project offers volunteers to design their own Repair Cafés. They can bring in their own ideas for implementation and execution. The collective intelligence and cohesion enables the groups to create their very own Repair Café.
What’s needed
Engaged citizen Full time volunteers Part time volunteers Strong arms Expertise/knowledge A room An open space A gardenObjectives
Raising awareness among fellow citizens about the throwaway society. We want to encourage people not to buy everything new immediately, but to save resources if possible and to repair or otherwise reuse things.
Impact
1. Ecological impact, through waste reduction.
2. social impact, by bringing people together, the social and factual exchange.
3.continuing education: Teaching people how to repair appliances themselves and interesting facts around it.
Target audience
All citizens young and old
Schools
Communities
Organisations
Corporate Business
Challenges and learning successes
A big challenge is to build up the network sustainably and to enable people to use it easily (e.g. through contacts to other local groups, information on how to run the Repair Cafés, etc.).
Despite this challenge, we have managed to establish 15 local and autonomous Repair Café groups in the country since February 2021.