Innovation: Repair Cafés
Netherlands and international
AAI Domains:
Participation in society (inter-generational activity, social connectedness)
Independent, healthy and secure living (lifelong learning)
Capacity and enabling environment (use of ITC)
Social innovation can combine the need for environmental sustainability and active ageing in a variety of ways and one of the most promising examples is the Repair Café Foundation movement. Repair Cafés provide a free to use meeting place that has a range of tools and materials that help people repair items that they might otherwise have discarded. There are people with specialist skills – electricians, carpenters, bicycle mechanics and so on – who volunteer their time and knowledge to support people to learn repair a broke item and to learn new skills.
The first Repair Café was founded by Martine Postna in Amsterdam in 2009 and the charitable Foundation was established in 2010 to act as an incubator and source of support for the development of Repair Cafés. The concept has quickly spread to scores of locations across the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, the UK and the USA as local user-led initiatives have sprung up. As part of the process of scaling up, Repair Cafés have joined forces with iFixit GmbH, a free to use publicly editable online repair manual that is based in Stuttgart and is the sister organisation to iFixit in the USA, that has hundreds of thousands of users across Europe.
As local user-led initiatives, the scope and scale of each Repair Café is different but they share a common ethos of consumers having the right to repair their goods rather than discarding and replacing them. They do not compete with professional repair services but act as a social centre for learning new skills and social interaction between people who are interested in leading a more sustainable lifestyle.
Up until 2013, the Repair Café Foundation provided free support to local groups but as the scale of the movement has grown – there were at least 700 Repair Cafés operating worldwide at the end of 2014 compared to only 275 in 2013 – but now charges a modest fee for providing guidance and support to local people interested in setting up a branch. The Foundation is funded by a mixture of grants from commercial organisations and individual donations and is a small organisation that promotes this big idea. Repair Cafés are open to all ages although they tend to be used more by men, particularly older men, who have acquired craft skills and want to develop and share them with the wider community.
In relation to active ageing, Repair Cafés provide a community-based place for voluntary activity and lifelong learning through the development of new skills. The social nature of the undertaking provides further opportunities for enhancing social connections as people share common experiences.
The composition of Repair Cafés varies but a core element is likely to be older men who already have a good deal of practical expertise in this area and this is particularly valuable as this group are often reluctant to join clubs or organisations compared to older women. The open-source and collaborative ethos also enhances the use of ICT as online forums are a key feature of the operation of Repair Cafés around the world.