 very lucky that we've been joined by people from around the world and we've on our panel is includes someone from four different continents right so we're going to hear first from Matthew who you heard from this morning and the the idea is that we're just going to get a sense of how community repair works in different places we it will start with a presentation but then as I said you will all have things to add so after that we'll kind of we'll hear from these guys we'll then ask you guys who just say who you are we're a small enough group that we can just go around everyone and then any questions that the presentations have have triggered and then we can just kind of use that to guide the rest of this the discussion rather than it being a big Q&A and some of you might have answers to each other's questions and vice versa that something first we have Matthew from who's from Uganda then we're gonna hear from Melly who's from Argentina and she runs Club de Reparadores then we're gonna hear from Perna from India and then and then we've got Emma from who runs a community network in Scotland so just be thinking about any of any questions that get sparked as they're talking so thank you very much for coming for turning to this session it's not going to be a long one but as you guys know there were some points or some parts which you were not talked about so much and that is more specifically on the lesson land from our operations and I'm going to talk about it and maybe so here from you people and finally I would introduce something that we are planning to do and I'll share it's at the end of the conversation so I will just go straight to the lesson lands as although I was talking about CC4D you know being the only repair organization that offers community repair services in the settlement and if I'm not mistaken in Uganda because most of them repairers you know those are commercial repairers and they usually know charge a lot of money and I don't know if it's the case with the repairers here in Europe those guys they like cheating which is so common so you find something that can be fixed just at lower price you can be charged a lot of money and until they want you to negotiate and say I you know I have only this amount of money and they'll push you and even make you pay more which is too bad something that we have learned and we're also trying like to to change that perspective and you know of people being overcharged or something small because sometimes when I'm fixing I feel like something like someone the user looks at it as a very big thing but to me I look at it as a small you know problem and sometimes when someone wants to give money you know those days when I was struggling to find ways to fill the kit which was given to me by rogue agents and still up to now is not yet full remember showing you people a tool kit the tool was empty they were in another picture there were two toolkits one was full and one empty and I was given a task you know to feel so when someone comes like one give me some money and more money I was like this is too much this thing does not cost a lot of money like this just give me what you can and it's now from the past ones heart and say you have done a great job for me have this and I don't do the day use this money to get more tools and fix it in the toolbox that's how we're trying you know to to fill up the tool kit which was provided and I earlier on also talked about the women having the fear of being shocked sometimes like fear of touching electronics we did a survey and in the survey we're trying to figure out what women love to fix and what we found was like they were more going on to mending clauses like showing clauses and they were like why oh no repair of electronics is for men we can't fix we can't manage to do that say no first try this out and we came up with it our first women inclusion in the repair culture where 12 of women were called for today's training day one was a training and day two for repair cafe so in one of the picture thank you that picture at the end where you see those ladies when the red cloth that was day one when the women repaired cafe was done and in that learning they were so impressed and later they fixed quite a number of items I still remember when they worked on a radio in the radio was able to function all jubilated and they were dancing it was so good and I felt too proud of myself because I was the one instructing their table and what we do is whenever we go for repair cafe events we make sure the women are attached to an expert who keeps on mentoring them slowly and as time goes on many of the women picked interest and it was like we have to do this when the repair cafe ended we got a lot of comments was like we didn't know that this thing is simple like this but now we can do it even now last week we were texting me when I was having the next repair cafe event because now they have picked interest and they wanted to continue with it a lot and this also has given us momentum to look for more things for more resources in order to sustain and train more women and repair because if you see many of the things are being fixed by women you know at four million maybe a man can be in town and you find maybe a socket is not working how do we do this woman can easily fix it not so so we need to empower more women and include them in repairs and I still also emphasize on the repair cafe events as a platform that brings people together from different angles hence promoting fees among especially post-conflict reasons it's so important and finally I don't want to take a lot of time we are currently wanting to popularize the international repair day last year we tried it one but we did not go further like having a bigger number of people and this time around we're trying to at least pull a bigger number of community and we're looking at the partners or the organizations that are working in the refugee camp because we have we found that there are a lot of environmental operating partners who are in the refugee settlements but their focus is more into planting trees making these eco-friendly stoves they have forgotten that the electronic waste contributes a lot to the climate changes or to the global army and they have neglected all those and we're looking at making the international repair cafe event event happen so that we can bring them and share with them how e-waste contributes to global warming how does it contribute how does it contribute to pollution of the environment the air the water what are the dangers so currently we are running a fundraising we have noted met our targets but we believe that the days are nearing today is the first and we are remaining with 14 days to the international repair day good enough or the good news is that we can still do it up to the 20th right and I'm looking forward to your support make the event a pain thank you hey hi everyone my name is Belina I'm one of the co-founders of Cluda reparadores and these attempt is to show a little bit of our work the past seven years already that's quite a long time and we explored a lot of dimensions around community repair and also share some of the projects that are currently ongoing in Latin America as well so this is something that is not new at all for all of you that our world is broken and the team that are behind the Cluda reparadores and I really felt that this was kind of a pressing issue that we should do something about it and our first approach was getting into waste management strategies and mostly promoting recycling from different kind of approaches but all of a sudden we realized like being really into the the topic in Buenos Aires that was quite inefficient and not sufficient as well so we we all of a sudden learned about repair cafes and restart parties and said is this something that we can actually do in our country and people are going to show up and we realized that repair was a much more efficient than recycling and there was much more necessary as to preserve that knowledge that is embedded in our neighborhoods and in our city so we like to think that repairing is caring and it's quite urgent given our present ecological and climate crisis and so this is kind of what drove us to to promoting the unorganizing community repair events it's like firstly we thought it was a way of preventing waste also reducing CO2 emissions and making the role of repairs more visible and valuable because we were noticing in fact that repair shops were closing and that they were kind of becoming extinct in our neighborhoods and also because we believe that repair has this beyond the material and concrete parts of repairing an object and extending its useful lifetime and it kind of has a psychomagic effect on people and in communities of yeah paying attention to things and stopping to care so what we intended to do was kind of yeah and attempt to resignify repair and to make it kind of irresistible and fun and possible at the same time right so in the past seven years we have organized our activity in in programs around firstly organizing ourselves events and community repair events that we call them the official events whatever and we done quite a few of them in different kind of open spaces in public spaces in cultural centers we also realize that some people approached us and said okay we want to organize our events or it's like yay obviously and so we help them out to organize events and right now we there are community groups are organized events in different parts of Argentina and there's a really strong group in Uruguay and some initiatives in Mexico Mexico as well we also have the opportunity to work alongside cities or local municipalities or companies as well that had an interest in in kind of approaching the topic but were a bit lost on how to do it so we co-organized events with them or set out sort of in-house events for companies to to look at how they their practices were and to involve their fellow employees as well and also always trying to bear in mind of the social impact that could have so for instance we something that we do quite often is we receive donations by a charity or a different kind of organization that needs repair because they cannot afford to repair the stuff and so we take it with a company or whatever and we organize a huge events and then we repair everything and we take it back so that's something that's been ongoing and it's quite good for everyone and soon after some time we also realize we wanted to work with schools because it was quite fundamental to get kids involved in yeah in repair so we develop a program for schools that started with certain activities in classrooms like a talk and some yet training in more so like environmental education and circular economy and we had board games and different kind of initiatives and we had this contest of creating environmental memes you know as well like just shaking up a little bit the topic but we didn't realize that it was gonna be super difficult to scale that project so we said no okay we should go directly to teachers so the following year we work this with the Ministry of Education of the city of Buenos Aires that has a program that's called green schools so they facilitated a lot of our work inside the schools that is something quite challenging if you come out of nowhere and so the second year we worked with teachers directly and that was a lot better because we could reach a lot more teachers and they did activities with within their schools and then we because of code it would say we cannot go into schools because our clothes so we developed that program online and now we can find all the resources we developed and you can download them for free and also we we later on we're gonna be showing some videos that we created for that and last but not least we realized that we were not focusing a lot in something that's quite essential that is kind of promoting the commercial repair sector and keeping it alive or kind of addressing something to make them more visible so what we did is create a repair directory to make repair and connect broken objects with repairs which is quite a challenge and we're gonna also have a session on that tomorrow if you want to learn more and this is something new that we are going to start on the 10th of October so I should get going and we're gonna alongside a program of the city government of Buenos Aires they're kind of in a quite big urbanization process of an area that is in the city center of Buenos Aires as you can see there is quite a one of the most expensive areas of the city is just right in the back and there's this informant settlement that has been going on for long years and so they invited us over because they are kind of urbanizing the area and they they identified as a lot of the people that tried to make an extra income within their neighborhoods resorts to the same kind of trade that is selling things they just create markets and they sell everyday things and that creates a lot of competition among them so they have to lower the prices so that's quite inefficient for them to create a good income so they are trying to teach these people with us how to to develop repair skills so that they can come have a different kind of employment so this is going to be super fun and challenging as well and then I wanted to share kind of a bit of the other phases that are behind our projects and since 2016 some women from Uruguay that have actually a design studio approaches and say we want to replicate the initiative in Uruguay and ever since they have organized over 22 events in Montevideo mainly and in different parts of Uruguay as well and I just I felt it was super important to see other phases than myself because it's I'm only like one little part of the whole movement and they are super enthusiastic and they created they have really good communication skills as well so really like tutorials to teach how to repair while COVID they did online fixing events and this is another case it's really recent because it's interesting to see how the community groups have different scales like the girls are like super professional in what they do and they have this amazing communication campaigns around the projects but in this case it's yeah a woman that approached us and said I have a garage at home that I would like to turn into a community repair center and then she organized these events once a month and it's amazing as well so I think that's something that's very valuable in terms of who are the people behind the community repair events and this is a case of Colorado which is a province in Argentina which in this case it was not a person not a company but was a kind of consortium of NGOs that decided to take on the topic and and promote events and they are amazing as well they actually are now have a deal with the local government to have an agenda for the whole of the year and they do this massive festivals with bands and food and so I think it's nice to let you know about that and in this case this is in Medellin in Colombia and that there's this place that's called Exploratorio that's it's a cultural center that is a city funded as well and they've been working alongside repair for the last two months with different community repair initiatives it's a super nice space and then Reparalao which is our it's in Chile our neighbor country and we they have been for quite some time working also with repair organizing events and working a lot with companies and how to recover waste and and we sell products out of waste and they also organize festivals and quite active in repair and this is something that I learned just like yesterday or the day before yesterday which I think it poses a nice no James I told you about this yeah that is something funny because all of a sudden a friend of mine sent me this link that is from the Instagram page of the city of Buenos Aires and they they are saying they have this really amazing agenda for the whole of October with community repair events but we were not invited so it's like okay I'm frustrated but then like thinking two times about this is like okay our job is done no kind of what we intend behind what we do is like for actually having a reaction and a more sustained impact right and when something is turning to a city policy or initiative it's like okay so I can so I'm quite happy about this I don't have to organize everything no it's gonna happen and I want one last conclusion that I think that's I've been thinking about lately in terms of how of what are the characteristics of community repair back home or what I know about in the region is that we learn from European projects right like a repair cafe like the restart parties and that's how we sort of imported this idea of community repair and I think we're in right now in the process of identifying and learning how to actually decolonize or look for our own identity within community repair and we have a manifesto certainly because we believe yeah that repairing is a lot of things like taking care of our planet and fighting off the lessons and saving resources here is our team that is spread out around the world right now but we're all female lead team and that's something that we also identify that all the organizers tend to be women back home and in the region so if you're interested in collaborating on getting on knowing more about us you can either follow us on social media or just write us in this email thank you hi everyone I have nothing to show so you have to listen look at me only sorry yeah I can tell you some some bit of my experiences when we started doing this repair cafe in 2015 you know every time we thought that the repair cafe Bengaluru has ended and it has actually come up with a new thing so somehow this whole repair cafe thing is pushing us to do to innovate and think about this repair as a as a subject and we are rediscovering ourselves every day I'll tell you how when we started in 2015 we thought that we just wanted to do this workshops so these are all we thought of design doing only pop-up workshops so we were doing pop-up workshops and they were a good response from resident welfare associations from schools from you know these design firms they all have given us spaces and they want us to do these repair cafe workshops so we are very interested to do it we're very excited to do it and we did about like more than 40 workshops you know and we are continue to do it but then we felt that in India this repair cafe format doesn't work there are a couple of reasons well this concept has started in Europe because the repair is expensive here but in India this is the other story we are a developing nation and we have repairs around the corner available we have of yesterday I raised the question on informal repairs so we in India we have 99% of our labor force which are informal and they are available on the streets and a percentage of them are in repair business so repair is just stones throw away for us so people in our country they don't appreciate we thought so they don't appreciate this repair cafe format but as I told you they didn't come up in the workshops also we tried hard we were sitting for half a day full day sometimes we were doing a bit of bit a bit of repair we did some good number of repairs also sometimes but we were feeling frustrated that okay why people are not responding here and then came the pandemic which is 2019 onwards and I wanted to conduct a summer training program for children which generally I used to do before that as a workshop and then suddenly happened what happened is we started this online program for children and this program was on home maintenance so children are actually sitting in their homes and they are being taught how to repair small small things in their homes for example if the tap water if the water is not coming properly from the tap can you change the filter is there something called filter exists so we introduced them and they were super excited about these modules and and when I and they are like till now about more than 70 children have attended online this is for the last three years I'm doing it and we have all our volunteers who became teachers and these volunteers are basically homemakers and they are interested in maintenance so they share their experience in the form of training modules and when I checked with the parents guess what can anybody guess parents wanted to join but they are the one who are following repair cafe from the day it was started but they never came to the workshops I don't know if it is embarrassment I had a mixed feeling but they are following us we thought that they are gone but they are following us and they felt regret they said we wanted to come but we could not come to your workshops because of whatever reasons but we want to connect with you so maybe this is the reason that we want to connect with you so children came in hordes and these are the parents who are following repair cafes and we were like shocked to hear all this people are very I mean you know the people are quite amazing I mean you don't know how will they react but I feel one has to understand what is their needs now as I said we kept on rediscovering ourselves so we came out from the mode of workshops our workshops are there it is still organized but we started making we have actually recently we made WhatsApp groups it's city based WhatsApp groups so right now we have three WhatsApp groups which are running in three cities like you know one in Bangalore one in Chennai and one in Hyderabad and guess what is this WhatsApp groups are all about there the DIY repair discussions happens repair referrals are suggested between the people who are interested because anybody who's living in that particular city they are interested in a local repair information because they need to repair their tarps they need to repair their iron boxes they want to know where are the spares available which are the local markets so they are the and and people are sharing their information their knowledge they are not they are experts sitting in these groups but there are people who are regular maintainers and they are sharing information between each other so that was a revelation oh my god this is a WhatsApp group which is a WhatsApp group you know it is just hi hello happy birthday you know condolences and this and that but there is no such thing happens they're actually DIY repair discussion happens I mean and who are these people again we started following you in 2015 we didn't want to we hadn't you know attended your workshop but we wanted to connect with you we wanted to join you this is their way of connecting with us so I mean people are surprised us so at every stage we kept on rediscovering ourselves and so so these are some of the things that we started and somehow the movement has not ended and it has gone beyond Bangalore now I have other cities which are coming up and India is a great potential people have repair knowledge they need a platform where they can talk about it because we have a culture we don't we don't throw anything we also thought that India is now into consumerist culture and people are interested in throwing things but it's only the reality happens in the city not beyond that so we are wrong and we are proven wrong and people are still interested in repairing their things and which is a great revelation for us being a repair cafe Bangalore thank you so much hi so I'm going to talk about the share and repair network in Scotland so I work with circular community Scotland and we are a charity that supports other charities and social enterprises we do that by representing our members and supporting them and I work more specifically with sharing libraries and with repair projects so it started because Scotland well the share and libraries were all wanting to have a kind of network to formalize and how they work together and everything and so they started working with circular community Scotland to have regular networking meetings and and then the Scottish Climate Assembly happened so we had a hundred people and representative of the community were given evidence by experts on what to do about climate change including and the CEO of our organization and and they give recommendations to the government about how to combat climate change and one of the strongest recommendations was to support reuse and that was the joint strongest one with 97% of people wanted to support more support for reuse and one of the specific recommendations was to support a network of sharing libraries so our organization put together a proposal in partnership with Edinburgh to library and Edinburgh make a way and we presented it and just on time they gave Scottish government and zero a Scotland a nice shiny and new story to put out during COP 26 to support our network to set up this network for sharing libraries and repair projects so the sharing libraries that we support could be libraries of things to libraries and basically non-profit organizations that run projects that share things people can borrow things rather than books and and then repair projects so again any non-profit organization that runs repair cafes but also repair services and so but just as long as the person brings something into repair and it goes back to the person who brought it in that's kind of where we draw the line with repair so I just thought I would give you some examples of the kind of projects that we support and so our partner one of our partners is Edinburgh make a way their social enterprise and they do a lot of work in refurbishing computers so they take donations of it to fight any kind of devices and they refurbish them and they sell them or donate them to people who need them and they also run workshops on repair and upcycling including repair bars which work much like repair cafes there's a general store Selkirk so they're a community interest company and and they're a repair shop they call themselves a repair mongery they they list what kind of things that they repair on their website so they say they do laptops tablets lamps vacuum cleaners radios power tools iron clothes china garden tools and they give up and say oh for goodness sake if you can bring it in we can take a look so you go in there you pay them a fee they'll look they'll take it away and their staff will repair it for you and there's a pram project that was born out of repair cafe Glasgow so repair cafe Glasgow were offered a massive donation of broken prams basically and realise there was a demand for prams as well and so you can bring your pram in and get it serviced if you have one maybe you've you had a child and then you've got a second child and you want to make sure the prams in good Nick you can bring it in or if you buy one second hand somewhere you can bring it in get it serviced refurbished and repaired and what they do they generate an income by taking the ones that are donated to them refurbishing them and selling them second hand and selling them selling them onwards they also donate a lot of prams to support families you're struggling financially and it's really the difference they're making in people's lives is incredible when you realise like the impact that not having a pram has on anyone who's and maybe doesn't have access to a car or a single parent families it's really crucial to them being able to have access to services and and been able to have the well-being of going to the park and then we support more traditional projects so there's repair cafe Ken Gormans that's your traditional repair cafe they're volunteer led self-sufficient they have monthly repair cafes and it's run by a village hall always makes me laugh when I came to this event they described it as being quiet to me that's a really busy thriving happy event so the aim of our network is to support and represent both new sharing libraries and repair projects that as they're getting set up and also and to help the existing ones to go their impact and become more financially sustainable we're doing that through setup guides training events developmental support specialist support and representation and so some of the challenges that we're having is and a lot of a lot of projects were fully funded in Scotland a few years ago and so they've all been set up with significant and revenue costs and everything they've got on loads of staff and they've made this great project and then that funding got slashed so a lot of our projects are really in crisis mode so you know we've been funded to set up help lots of more groups set up but at the same time the ones that we have are struggling and so what we're trying to do is and bring in more funding for the groups that exist in the ones that are getting set up and another challenge but also a great thing obviously is the diversity of groups and so as you saw we have ones that are generating an income ones which are your traditional repair cafes and trying to find ways to support all of them can sometimes be a little bit tricky and a lot of groups come to me and they say what is the best way of attracting a volunteer for example and I'm very bad for saying well it depends on your community and it depends on you know you know your area best I can't answer that but obviously I need to give answers so one thing I try to do is to and is getting easier as we go along and I'm learning more and more groups is I can at least say I'll give them that answer but then say in another rural area this is what a group stand or in another area of deprivation this is what another group's done and I think that's really valuable for groups of people to learn from each other and also a lot of what the network to do is to bring them together so they can learn from each other and to support them financially so they can take the time to teach each other and communication so I think this is a really common issue for all networks is that not everybody wants to communicate through the same means of communication so some people love Facebook some people hate Facebook some people love Slack some people hate Slack and just trying to get everybody in the same place is I've just kind of given up now and gone with the majority and just made a slack group and put out a newsletter but it can be it can be a little bit tricky and the other challenge is geographical spread so as you can see some of our groups it's not a big country it's a very small population but there's a massive geographical spread so I've got some in the cities and some really far away so trying to get everybody in the same room is impossible pretty much so one thing we're doing is everything is online at the moment except for our online conferences and that's really working well because it means that someone you know on an island can can come to it as easily as everybody else so that's basically all I have to say if you want to get in touch with anything we'd love to hear from you those my contact details thanks very much thank you it's been really interesting hearing about the massive diversity in how you've approached the problem of getting people to repair and to the to the point where you think your job's done in that respect anyway so so what we thought we'd do now is there's could those of you at the back come forward a bit so that we can make it a little bit more of a discussion and I know that we've got people from around the world and a lot of you will be involved in community about so can we just go around and it'll be a bit clunky because the microphone and just kind of get a sense of obviously your name how you're involved in in repair and where you're based and then any kind of big questions that have that this discussion is brought up or or things that you've been kind of thinking about lately that you that the rest of the group might be able to help and say once we've gone round I'll just I'll keep an eye on questions and then we'll kind of pull out the ones that come up a lot that's okay hello my name is Louise I'm from France I've been involved with repair in different situations so I'm part of an association a local association that helps people build and repair stuff so I'm mostly on woodcraft but there is also like electronics and leather and cosmetics and different kind of stuff and and I also work on a project to help create mobile repair space in France for forcibly displaced persons to fix stuff on their own thank you okay my name is my name is Jean-Sévesse Singh I'm from Montreal Canada I'm working for a company that's called insert tech we're in social inclusion program for people from 16 to 25 we're mostly refurbishing computers and phones we've been holding restart parties which we call reparo time because we need to translate everything in Quebec since 2015 that's about it hello yeah my name is Mercedes I'm based in the UK and we run a non-for-profit called Merit and we we it's a bit of a circular economy we mainly specialize in the training young people how to become IT technicians but it really comes from the idea that hardware and software is the new reading and writing and it should be accessible to everyone you know we all have devices in our hands all the time and if you know how they work and how to fix them whether it is you fixing them or not you are you become a better better but you can't buy better you can understand why repair can be expensive so we try to teach what we teach many different audiences as well from children in schools to elderly in community centers through digital skills and we don't sell at the moment we donate everything that gets repaired by our students we just donated and put it back into the community hi my name is Dave I'm from London the UK I was one of the founding members of Hackney fixers which was one of the first groups that sprung off restart about eight years ago we've been doing repair cafes big fixing events where we've had I think we have 30 fix the one event fixing electronics bikes fabrics furniture I think that was about it and since then I've moved on I've moved out of Hackney I'm now in South London I'm helping with a repair cafe there and we're gonna start another repair cafe as well at some point in the near future hello my name is Quora I'm from Norway and this summer I started a company making it easier for consumers to repair their clothes so through my service you can book and order your repairs online I come and pick it up at your place and bring it to our tailor who will repair your clothes and I deliver it back home at your doorstep so my business tried to make it as easy as ordering something from H&M online to make it as easy to repair just just for test and my name is Asha I live in Amsterdam we started six months ago first our repair cafe with my ex-company we are doing consulting for sustainability so we finally decided to do some some stuff with our hands not writing reports and making peaceful data visualization about impact so yeah I'm learning a lot and I have a lot of questions how to make it better and better to bring somewhere else so yeah I'm happy to be here my name is Thomas Snyder and I come from the region of Bonn I repair my own life machines furniture building furnitures working as a house technician and now I'm six years ago as you go to repair cafes and I like to repair it gives me a good feeling when things broken the action of the people they're very happy the things are working at I see no lady I've worked two and a half hours on yeah it was a waffle machine two hours to put the stuff out and have an hour to repair but we're happy let all lady close hello everyone I'm Eduardo from Reuser and we are a European organization representing social enterprises in the field of circular economy so we advocate for right to repair at you level and I have no particular question but just a big thank you to the speaker for showing us what we bear is like outside the EU to show us your concrete experience because it can also be helpful for us in advocating at you level so really thank you hello my name is Charlie from resource features in Bristol I'm the community impact lead there and we have six projects and one of those is soon to be to supporting a network of community action groups which includes library of things repair cafes community larders all sorts of different things and another that's quite relevant to this is a bus called Fixie which is in the rural community which is doing repair but also collecting technology basically to redistribute so I guess that yeah it's been really really interesting listening to everyone on the panel and I think it's interesting how in some ways developing countries are quite far ahead of us in terms of reuse and repair being in the culture and also in one session heard about how Australia have just made amazing inroads in their data and copyright working with the car industry so I think it's a it's great to hear all these ideas I guess it's thinking how can we have a forum to share all the time I guess so we can be always learning from each other in this way building on this kind of sharing on an international level that we're doing here my question hi my name is Alex I'm from South Africa and I'm doing a PhD here in Belgium at K Louvin about business models for a pair so I'm trying to find ways to make repair more self-sufficient and in the current policy environment so in the current policy environment how can repair be more sustainable and I would just also like to say I think it's interesting for me coming from South Africa I think it's similar to a lot of other African countries yeah I've noticed in Belgium that there is a lot of device that could be repaired being thrown away which is often not really the case in South Africa if in South Africa people even if someone throws something away someone will go to the garbage dump pick it up repair it and then sell it or keep it or use it or something like that so that's quite a big difference so even though you know Belgium was such a developed country but in that way South Africa or other African countries are better in that sense yeah thank you it's easier just then my name is Wille I'm also from Norway and I run restartors Norway so it's kind of the same as a restart group so we have fixed fests and work politically to like yeah make the policy makers change the way they think about repair so yeah and for now we're having fixed fests and I'm just trying to figure out how I can do that in a way that's more like for young people because the problem in Norway is that the younger generation and doesn't go to fixed fests because it's not hip in the same way as clothing fixing clothing so yeah that's why I'm here hello I'm Enzo I'm coming from France I'm what I'm working at the Amres Maison régionale de l'environnement des solidarités it's the regional home for the environment and the solidarity I'm working on the development of numeric platform for the network of the repair café in the north of the France hello I'm Arne from Denmark and I'm a volunteer in three repair cafes in the repair cafes in Denmark they are normally open once a month in a couple of hours two three four hours some are open a bit more we have a policy of what we repair saying that if you can bring it to the table then we will repair it at least if it doesn't require a microscope so that's my start into this but then a year ago I also entered in as a volunteer in our national board which is an organization supporting all the repair cafes with whatever we feel that they would like us to do so we have some development projects going on there for the time being it's making a mobile repair cafe from either a trailer or from a bike got two two projects there and we are taking part in the political discussions because what we do is they we more or less gather the strength of all the repair cafes we've got 70 or in fact 73 repair cafes in Denmark and we gather the strength for them to try to approach the politicians right now we are having problems because they say there's going to be an election and they can't talk with us which we do not understand of course and we represent the organization on different kind of cultural events and stuff like that I have a question for at least three of the earlier speakers Argentina and India and you said UK you all mentioned that you do training for children what I was interested in is when you say children well you said high school but what are the age we're talking about we've we've got some activities regarding public school children fifth grade but I would like to know what age are you talking about in your projects hi my name is Lynn and I'm one of the coordinators of the german network for community repair groups and yeah we support repair cafes all over Germany via email or phone support we doing network events for them in different regions or a big network event and we built up so we are doing this since 2014 and yeah we built up a website where they can register and doing profiles and talking about the events and where we share all the knowledge about how to set up a repair cafe and yeah and we publish a little magazine it's called splitter where we collect all stories about repair and yeah and this year we were really happy that a lot of new repair cafes were yeah after the two or three years the last two or three years there now a lot of new repair cafes are coming up and I think we have around a thousand repair cafes in Germany I'm Holly I'm based in London and I work with for the restart project so I feel like I'll give other people more time to answer questions and stuff because thanks everyone um for me at least it was really helpful to just get a sense of who's in the room and also hear about your projects um so uh there were a few questions that came up just in terms of the forum to share how we carry this conversation on there's a session on that tomorrow afternoon I think it's I'll have to I can't remember if it's straight after lunch or after that but it's it's all about the global networks might even be for lunch I'll double check and let you know um so so join that if because that's exactly what that conversation is about there was a very clear question about training for children and what age so perhaps we can tackle that and I wonder if and I think if there's any other questions that people had let me know but it felt like there's another question that came up from the panel which was um the challenge of it's relatively easy to get start-up funding but then how do you get how do you keep it going um so if anybody's got any any examples of how that's worked either on the panel or in the audience that would be great did you have a question I wanted to ask a question about repair in multicultural environment and that might be a question for all of you but maybe for you Matthew as well on uh if you could share about experiences of repairs with potentially different languages and different nationalities and if you've been like how did it go and uh how is it with translation how is it with a different approach of repairing potentially thank you and if anyone in the the public has some minimum defender as well thank you let's do that one first um and then we'll go on to the training young people and then we'll see how much time we've got well thank you so much our operation in the multilingual communities that uh we involve people who are from the different you know eternities and the different tribes at least we involve them and during our repair cafe events so that uh we clear out issues around the language barriers so having people who speak multiple languages has helped us a lot in uh showing issues regarding the language problem thank you in our country also we are multilingual and multicultural but you know uh when you strike on the subject of repair it doesn't matter because everybody understand that we have come from repair for doing something which is so uh i mean that is a great power i mean it's i feel it's like a spiritual power of repair that you know it really transents into connection between the people of different cultures different places i mean people connect instantly even if they can't communicate thanks to answer maybe not not on this one but about the age um so might as well um but in our case it's high school so they are like from 13 to 17 uh depending on the school uh teacher yeah so uh yeah so thanks so what we found is that uh children who are eight years and above like till 14 years they are super excited about anything unstructured uh you know education so repair is one of them something where they can make and break things this age group is super excited about experimenting the problem starts after 14 and the mind is already set and they say yeah i've already done it leave it so this age group uh whether you want to do training programs you want to offline they are super excited and any subject whether it's cycle repair electrical anything you give it and they have it of course they have some fear about stitching because guys are just not interested in they know how to they don't know how to even thread the needle that's a problem i don't know it's a mindset i don't know what is it i mean i remember in one of the classes the guy has said no i will not do it i'll tell my mother to do it i said the training program is not for you i mean not for your mother it's for you so i don't know it's some some mindset problem but rest is this age group is super excited about any repairs thank you um we we we specialize on 18 onwards uh difficult to reach teenagers for our um you know become an IT technician program but we taught from five years onwards obviously totally different programs but um i would agree that from eight years old we've seen a lot of potential of how quickly they pick it up and and you know what we teach for example in a in four hours lesson to teenagers you teach the same ungraded in the terminology and you know but but the same same concepts to eight years old they pick it up in an hour like i know when you're talking about is and i think is the enthusiasm they might not pick up all the the knowledge and the and the um the theory that is necessary the vocabulary that is necessary terminology but they they grasp the concept really really well so eight to ten twelve is an amazing age to get really get them started that we we have done courses for five years old and you know it's fun um so did anybody have any brain waves or tips about ongoing funding keeping projects going once you've got past the startup phase um if you can get it depending on the environment let me tell the story about hankley fix it took us four years to get our first local government grant but once they've given you one grant then you're in with you know there is a certainly inertia in local government for once they've given you one grant they're happy to give you another one because you're then an approved organization they know you you know what forms are filling you know what the bureaucracy it takes you a long time to get to that stage so yeah it takes you a long time to get to that stage otherwise you know you can founder in the meantime so in the meantime volunteers are very important you need to keep that consistency going so you can have you know we had a wonderful guy james who just did all the boring bureaucracy filling in the forms applying for grants all that kind of thing and if you don't have that then you'll get nowhere right but yeah just keep on going that's the trick right be boring just keep on going keep on applying for grants from foundations from local government charities everything eventually you'll get somewhere once you've got one lot of money of course people think you're successful they want to be a part of that and so suddenly more money appears like magic um my experience is from the uk only um we really struggle with getting funding not because we don't get funding we get a lot of funding you know you look at our organization and you say you are really successful but the problem is that um once you are growing in the uk you only get funders only tend to give you 20 percent of your income from the previous year so if um you know if you last year did 10 000 pounds you are only going to get 2000 pounds and maybe your cost for that year are 30 000 pounds which is always going to be insufficient because um it's very difficult to care funding for core cost which is salaries rem rental electricity you know what keeps you running you will get funding for running a project which uses all your resources and and you can get yourself into a circle of just running after the money all the time instead of using your resources for actually doing the job that could be a lot of quite a burned out but um i'm i'm just quite impressed with the um repair together and their um the mobile repair thing um they are funding well they just told me that they got funding from the waste authority um i really have a feeling that um waste authorities should you know should really be funding a lot of the work we do because um you know it's a movement from the community i see it as it is a cultural change but the money should come from the government it should come from the waste authority so possibly um also saying look this is working in a different country this is working in a different city they're doing it we want to do it here as well um again this networking that could be really good because then we could share data and and replicate it and we had a good um discussion in the last session about how how to make high street repair more sustainable so that really fits in with what um you were saying but anyway it's an ongoing discussion nobody has unfortunately the the right answer um Emma had a response to one of the early questions um yeah to the question about languages earlier um i just wanted to give an example of how i agree with your point that language actually doesn't matter that much at a repair cafe in that we had a repair one group repair cafe Glasgow as a really nice example of an asylum seeker who came from Syria who's now speaking english because he came to join the repair cafes to learn english and it was a really good chance for him to meet people to have the chance to speak in english with so actually i think they can be a really good opportunity to help people with languages as well as not being a barrier to people taking part in them thank you so we've got a little bit of time left of the session um but the next one is in here um so are there any other kind of more burning questions before we finish no if you have a question answer it well that's not a question but i've been talking to a lot of you during the last two days here and one of the things that i have noticed that you find a bit interesting is that we use for our recruiting of cafes into our network uh that we can help these in a way that they really want to it just as you said over there you give information and how to start network how to recruit uh volunteers but our main trump in our bouquet of offering is that every every cafe that joins our network has automatically in an insurance covering any errors in the the products that have been repaired we don't cover their insurance as when they are working because that's a personal liability insurance that's covering that but we have an insurance that is covering any damage result from bad repairs not that we've had any of course but uh it's a very much uh helping us recruiting cafes into the network thanks that's a really good piece of advice and on that note i wonder if the panelists could each give us your number one piece of advice for people um helping community repair who wants to go first i've just sprung this on them i didn't give them a warning so yeah but i guess um it's really it really has a lot to do with uh kind of uh conducting voluntary energies uh to some extent because um many people approach or when i get involved with community repair on a voluntary basis and uh and it's true it is something quite difficult uh to to finance i mean we struggle a lot and we got really creative in terms of who to ask how to ask what to offer who are not to offer where to do it who to getting who should get involved um so i think it's it's kind of um in the end what we're really trying to do is kind of contribute to a cultural shift around repair um trying to yeah make repair easy make repair attractive and you were talking about making it cool for young people we also try to do that um so then i think it's kind of uh it's not something that's going to happen from one day to the next this is not the short advice i'm sorry not good to make a synthesis but i would like to say that uh it's kind of um like kind of being patient and caring for the process um and yeah and try and basically collaborating that's the word people collaborating just like with energy i i sorry i don't have any advice to give but i like the fact that this whole idea of repair cafes and restart and the such movements are the information the knowledge is evolving this is a very interesting stage of uh this and i'm part of this evolving stage i'm very glad i'm glad of it i think i mean that's that's that's good that's good enough for me at least thank you so much thank you so much uh main is about uh keeping updated the databases um which is so important that every repair cafe should take it um so that we all fill up the central database i think restart has started it and i was looking into previous repair cafe events that i didn't organize and some of the repair cafe places they have created the event but you find what had happened is not being entered yeah even us we are also victim but uh we'll you know take it up and fill it yeah so that's something that i feel we should improve on thank you um something i think that's really important for um supporting groups that are wanting to get started is um just giving a bit of reassurance like i've had groups come to me say i've got a few volunteers and we've got a space and we've all got our own tools but i don't think we're ready and you know i'm like you're much more ready than we were before we started like you're 10 steps ahead of where we were do it tomorrow you can you can get it started or they're a little bit frightened about the electrical side of things so i've had an engineer say to me that he's too scared to do it for people and it's like the insurance is there the the electrical safety checking is there it's you can do it tomorrow so i think a lot of the time is just giving people that bit of reassurance that that it's not that difficult actually i mean it has difficult moments but in the grand scheme of things it can be done quite easily and i think reassurance that it's not that difficult is a great way to finish we've not we're not quite finished hang on one more thing that we learned is publicity right span every channel you've got on social media right don't be afraid people think oh yeah if we just put up you know if we put it on facebook everybody will know about it no they won't yeah some people hate facebook some people hate whatsapp etc etc spam every single channel you can you know put it in local newspapers if you can um every single social media put up posts boring old-fashioned posts that work really well the first big event we had we I just put up posters all around the area we got that literally a thousand people right so publicity like craze you know tell your friends get it on next door get it on whatever social media channels you have especially the local you know you know things like they're usually neighborhood facebook groups things like that find every single one get on right thank you and actually on that note perna i was think the one thing i took away from your presentation was was like use facebook group uh whatsapp groups so um so i thought that um so that that fits in really well with with what david said so thanks very much to our brilliant panel from around the world thank you to those of you in the audience who also took part and and shared your knowledge