The newest Wokingham Repair Café had its first live session at the weekend with 68 items processed between 10am and 1pm. Only 37 per cent were not fixable.
The session, at All Saints Church in Wokingham, was visited by the Deputy Town Mayor for Wokingham, Cllr Rob Comber who brought his bike for repair. The gears had siezed, but repairer Simon Willis, pictured here, managed to free up and oil the gears, and replace the gear cable to get the bike up and running.
Also pictured here with the Deputy Mayor is Maya of Maya’s Refillables (On Peach Place), one of the WRC partners.
The Wokingham Repair Café met the previous week on Saturday 6th April for a ‘dry run’ so that the volunteers could find out how the sessions will run and could see how the various systems and table layout would work. They even managed to fix a few items brought along by the team!
A spokesman said: “The session went well, booking items in, steering ‘customers’ to the right repairer, and closing the ticket when the item had been repaired. There were some modifications to the table layout suggested, and some tightening up of the tracking process, but overall it was a very successful practice which filled us with confidence for our first live session.”
The new Wokingham Repair Café is now open for repairs on the second Saturday of the month at spaceforall, in All Saint’s Church.
The Repair Café was initiated by Martine Postma. Since 2007, she has been striving for sustainability at a local level in many ways. Martine organised the very first Repair Café in Amsterdam, on October 18th, 2009. It was a great success.
This prompted her to start Repair Café International Foundation. Since 2011, this non-profit organisation has provided professional support to local groups in the Netherlands and other countries wishing to start their own Repair Café.
Photos by Paul King. For more pictures, see May’s My Wokingham newspaper.