The Rotary clubs of Godalming, Surrey, have been experiencing one of the club’s most successful recent projects with their Repair Café.
A Repair Café is a meeting place where people can gather for free and have broken household items repaired by volunteers with craft and engineering skills.
The concept has been growing in popularity across the UK but Godalming’s Repair Café is one of the first to be ran by Rotarians.
The official opening of the Godalming Repair Café in October 2022.
There are no costs involved for the people that visit the café who are also offered coffee, tea and cake, but they are welcome to make donations.
Ian Coult, a member of Godalming Woolsack Rotary Club, got together Moira Davies and Joy Poulter of Godalming Rotary Club to put the idea into practice.
A team of volunteers, almost all non-Rotarians, were put together and Ian, Moira and Joy were able to officially open the Repair Café.
The café operates in a local community hall one Saturday every month with a team of over 25 volunteers that have so far helped fix 147 broken household items.
Ian Coult explained: “The key advantage of starting a repair cafe to a Rotary club is the contact it brings with non-Rotarians who are interested in volunteering and keen to use their skills to help others. Repair cafes are part of the rapidly expanding network of repair and reuse organisations which include Restart projects and fixing factories.”
As the project continues, Ian is hoping the café will eventually become a Rotary Community Corps, a group of non-Rotarians that supports their local Rotary club in carrying out community service projects.
