Repair Café Aotearoa NZ (RCANZ) is marking International Repair Day on 15th October online The Repair Show, Saturday 15 October 10am - 1pm. with exciting repair stories and interactive demonstrations as well as livestreaming of some of the repair café events happening in Aotearoa.

International Repair Day is celebrated on the third Saturday of October. It celebrates the power of community repair to prevent waste and share skills and encourages everyone to try out repair. This year we’ll see repair attempts from mountain tops to rooftops, national monuments to local parks. 'Repair Everywhere'!

International Repair Day celebrates anyone supporting us to keep our things in use for longer: from local repair shops to national businesses that provide repair information, spare parts and tools; from people trying a repair for the first time to experienced DIY fixers, and of course the movement of community repair groups that get fixing each week.

Across the country, more than 40+ groups are already offering low-cost repairs to their local community, and more are forming every month.

Brigitte Sistig, Co-founder of RCANZ says: “People in the Kiwi Repair Community across the country are coming together to repair and discovering something positive and practical we can do now to help each other and the planet.”

“Lamps, small kitchen gadgets, devices, clothes and bikes are often easily fixed, but many people don’t know where to start. At our 40+ local repair cafés, we have lots of local volunteers with the right knowhow who are willing to help. If we can keep good household items working longer, it saves all the materials and emissions needed to make something new. So, we are not only helping each other but doing our bit to tackle the climate emergency.”

“In these uncertain times, people are looking for ways to reconnect with their community, to save money and live more sustainably. Community repair events bring people together to help each other, share skills, cut waste and the use of resources, and can help Aotearoa play its part in tackling the climate emergency.”

Quote by James Pickstone from The Restart Project:

“More and more communities are discovering the benefits of repair and together, doing something that could have real and positive climate impact. But we need repair-friendly policies to make it much easier for people to get things fixed and unlock all those benefits to our communities, the economy and the planet. That’s why we urgently need a real Right to Repair enshrined in law.”

Notes for Editors

1. Repair Cafés are pop-up events that offer communities the opportunity to come together and help each other repair broken household items for a koha. They are fundamentally based on the goodwill and generosity of repair experts and the support from the community. People are encouraged to participate in the assessment process of their item, which is a great way of learning how your object functions, what went wrong and what it needs to be fixed. The repair can be observed or partaken in, if safe. Repair Cafés offer a place where different generations and cultures mingle, build community as well as opportunities to learn about waste reduction and extend the life span of one’s belongings.
2. Repair Café Aotearoa NZ was set up in September 2020 to support this voluntary effort with promotion, advocacy, and capacity building to amplify the impact of repair for local communities. It is a champion of the Right to Repair movement and the shift to a circular economy in New Zealand. We’re building a network of Repair Cafés around Aotearoa, as an accessible solution to address waste and climate justice. These are spaces to build community connections and resilience, endorse our Kiwi DIY culture and lighten our footprint on the earth.
3. Each repair café has between 5 and 27 volunteers, offering a variety of repair skills, reaching from mending/ sewing repairs to bike fixing, repairing small household appliances and electric equipment repairs and more. Please refer to the + map of local repair cafés for further details. These wonderful volunteer repairers fix between 63% and 97% of items brought in, depending on spare parts availability and time.
4. Members of the Open Repair Alliance started International Repair Day in 2017. The group seeks to link repair activists through the sharing of data on barriers and successes experienced at community repair events worldwide. Founding members are Anstiftung Foundation (Germany), Fixit Clinic (US) The Restart Project (UK), Repair Café Foundation (Netherlands) and iFixit (US).

© Scoop Media