The Brighton Repair Café is a community of people learning how to repair our things rather than dispose of them. Monthly events offer us the opportunity to bring broken items along to a place where the appropriate tools for repair are available and someone with knowledge and skills can give us advice on how to repair our possession. People who come to the cafe can learn new skills, or share their knowledge with others at the café in an informal social setting.
Rather than encouraging the creation of more material objects from our finite resources, repairing encourages a re-appraisal of the resources we have to hand. It highlights the skills required to repair, which will be lost if not put into practice and passed down through generations.
Repairing is not only a creative and political activity – creating a sense of empowerment and independence – it is also a way of creating community cohesion and reducing waste. We believe the repair cafe is an innovative and straightforward local solution to a global problem. It connects people from all social and professional backgrounds via one very simple activity – repairing
Brighton Repair Café is part of the Repair Cafe Foundation which was established by Martine Postma in Amsterdam in 2007.