By Mikayla van Loon
In a little over 12 months, Chirnside Park’s Repair Cafe has saved an estimated 1000kg of waste from going to landfill, built strong community connections and provided a space of purpose once a month.
The first birthday milestone in May was a celebration of the need and desire of the broader community to repair rather than throw away.
Coordinator Rowan Barr said she has been extremely pleased with the uptake of the volunteer run service, seeing people change their mindset of being a circular economy rather than a linear one.
“We’ve had more than 20 people attend each session with hundreds of items being repaired. Electrical items are the number one brought in to be repaired because they do have a short life span and they’re designed that way,” she said.
“Which is part of what the repair cafe movement wants to change: the right to repair and availability of parts, which is happening in Europe, it’s just slower in Australia.”
With three talented sewers and seamstresses, a test and tag machine, someone for “general handyman repairs” and woodworkers, metal workers and a jeweller, there’s little that can’t be fixed.
While keeping items out of landfill is the main aim, Ms Barr said there is also a learning element to it, where people can come and watch in order to take home a basic knowledge of how to fix something themselves or even to just understand where to get the right part from.
“I’ve realised that it’s also about diagnosis of repairing first, that diagnosis is the first step and then referring people for parts,” she said.
In one example Ms Barr said a woman came in with a broken pair of $300 headphones and a month later returned with the correct part to be fitted.
“There’s a lot of value in repairing things. We want people to think of repair as their first port of call before buying new.”
This is particularly pertinent in Australia given the buy and throw away culture that sees us being one of the biggest consumers of fast fashion, with every Australian buying 56 items of clothing yearly and 200,000 tonnes of clothing going to landfill.
“In Australia, consumption is really our number one issue. People are just buying too much stuff too often because it’s cheaply produced and sold. People in Australia look at cost as the motivation,” Ms Barr said.
“Whereas in Europe, people actually have a really different mentality around their consumption and it’s not really about it being cheap, they very much want to keep things for longer periods of time.”
Part of this however, is accessibility to repair services, education around what can and can’t be repaired and advocacy for companies to do better when it comes to common problems in their items.
Ms Barr said with the help of administration volunteers the items that are repaired in Chirnside Park are logged on a central database and sent to the repair cafe headquarters in Amsterdam to “make reports and they lobby governments and businesses”.
And although the scale of this after just one year is impressive, Ms Barr said the more volunteers and the more the word is spread that this service is available in Chirnside Park will help grow the offering even further.
“We’re always looking for new volunteers to put their hand up and help once a month. We’re always looking for more people to offer different skills.
“Anyone who wants to volunteer with repair skills, or they can offer the time to help out in the front of house, it’s a very easygoing environment. We’re all there to have fun and enjoy.
“Also, anyone wanting to learn repair skills, it might be the younger generation because we’re losing these skills now. So any younger people who might be interested in learning how to repair stuff can come along and watch and be part of it.”
Chirnside Park Repair Cafe works on a donation basis, with people asked to pay what they can in order to keep the service going.
“We’re providing an affordable, very high quality service to the community. But we can’t run on a gold coin donation. It doesn’t mean that everyone has to give $20,” Ms Barr said.
“We wish it could be free but until we get grants or sponsorship, which would be the next stage, then we could essentially make it free.”
Until that time, Ms Barr encourages people to come along to the monthly repair sessions, whether it’s to get an item fixed, to learn or to just have a conversation.
The next repair cafe session is on Sunday 7 July, then 4 August and 8 September, running from 10am to 12pm.
It’s located at the Cire Chirnside Park Community Hub on Kimberley Drive. To make an inquiry, contact Rowan Barr on 0450 828 800 or by emailing repaircafemelbourne@hotmail.com
