Repair Cafe crew to reflect on five years

THE team behind the Ballarat Repair Cafe will soon celebrate an important milestone.

Later this month, the initiative’s coordinators and volunteer repairers will get together with the community to celebrate five years in operation.

Co-coordinator, Sue Jakob said a key driver for the working group has been about educating the community about the importance of sustaining items for half a decade.

“Five years means we’ve had a massive impact on repairs in Ballarat both in terms of saving waste from landfill and educating the community about the importance of repair.

“Hopefully we’ve had an impact on education especially, and teaching people you don’t have to throw things away even though we do live in a consumerist environment.

“It’s about impact as much as how many items we’ve repaired.”

With a morning tea following proceedings, the event will feature Australian Repair Network founder, Professor Leanne Wiseman as special guest speaker.

After the presentation, a Q&A panel discussion will be held between City of Ballarat councillor Belinda Coates, and volunteer repairers Allan Mallows and Liz Wade, with ABC reporter Rochelle Kirkham hosting.

Ms Jakob said Ms Wiseman’s presentation will highlight an ongoing goal for the initiative.

“Something we’re working on is collecting data across the country to add to the national database around what sort of items break down easily,” she said.

“We want to advocate more towards the right to repair items because a lot of companies don’t give out information about how to repair items or they can only be repaired by their own repairers.

“[Ms Wiseman] is from Griffith University in Brisbane who’s been doing research into the right to repair so she’s been bringing the repair cafes across Australia and finding out about the issues we face.”

The Ballarat Repair Cafe was founded by Mary Duff in 2019 as a local offshoot around an initiative that started 15 years ago in the Netherlands.

It’s estimated local volunteers have fixed more than 500 items.

The initiative provides a space for people to get their items repaired as well as learn about the process, from 1pm to 4pm on the last Saturday of each month.

The celebration will take place from 10am on Saturday 27 July at Barkly Square. Although free, registration is encouraged and can be done so at bit.ly/3Y1MsIQ.