Lee Robb is a co-founder of the Repair Cafe Belfast. The cafe, which has popped up in various venues across Belfast since October 2017, is building a community of fixers and people who want to get stuff fixed in Northern Ireland.
Lee is also a development officer at Development Trusts Northern Ireland with extensive experience of community-led regeneration projects in Northern Ireland.
Who are you and what do you do?
I help run Repair Cafe Belfast. I live in Carrickfergus in Northern Ireland. I’m involved in community building in Carrickfergus and I do community asset transfer development for Development Trusts NI.
What’s the point of the Repair Cafe?
We celebrate the joy of repair in community.
Fundamentally we’re interested in helping people connect with their stuff, themselves and their communities. We do pop-up community repair events across Belfast in different locations once a month. The largest thing we have repaired is a petrol lawn mower and that in a former church hall. When it was fixed, and the cork was pulled, 110 people cheered at the same time!
The point is to change people’s relationship to their stuff, so they think they might be able to have a go at repairing their own stuff. It’s not about us fixing all the stuff, because we could never do that, it’s about introducing people or reintroducing people to the possibilities of repair and hoping that they will start to think of it as an alternative to throwing things away.
People stay with their stuff while it is being repaired and might get involved in the repair.
Repair Cafe celebrates 10 years of fixing up instead of throwing out | @hazelsheffield https://t.co/8gJFiXcVHO
— Independent Minds (@indyminds) September 5, 2019
One of my favourite pieces of feedback was from a woman who brought a broken chair. After her chair was fixed, she said, “Now I’m going to go home and fix my other five kitchen chairs!”
People leave feeling energised and a bit more confident.
What was the moment you decided to do this?
Initially it was a response to the climate emergency. Chris, the initiator of our repair cafe, put a call out on social media for people interested in starting a repair café because she was interested in community-led responses to climate emergency and I said, “I’m in.”
That was about October 2017 and we brought people together to talk about what we needed to get this up and running.
What’s been your proudest moment?
At the first repair cafe, I was running our pay as you feel café, where people can get drinks and food while they are waiting. I went to see if our fixers needed tea or coffee and Dave, one of our fixers, was working on a toaster. He wanted to see if he had managed to fix the toaster but he didn’t have any bread. I ran to the kitchen and grabbed a slice of bread and Dave, the toaster owner and I stood and watched it as it was toasting. We were absolutely delighted when it popped up lightly toasted! I had no idea that I could feel emotional about a piece of toast! Finding that sense of satisfaction along the way has been really gratifying.
What’s been the hardest thing?
The ongoing challenge for me is about creating a culture that focuses on building community rather than delivering a service. It’s not what people are expecting when they first come to a repair café. So, we’re constantly having to challenge a wider service mentality and the transaction that comes with that mentality that I believe has encroached too far into our everyday lives.
Another challenge is that we have a collective sense of creating something really special.
How do we respond to the demand for our repair cafe in an intentional way that doesn’t eat away at the magic?
What keeps you going when it gets hard?
I recently read about “collective effervescence”, a concept defined by the classical sociologist, Emile Durkheim.
I think it’s such a great way of describing the joy that is created at our repair cafés when we get a group of people together who don’t know each other but have a common purpose and a common bond. It feels amazing. That’s what keeps me going.
What’s the next step?
We have had lots of interest from individuals, organisations and councils about setting up repair cafes. We’d really love to see a network of repair cafes in towns and villages across Northern Ireland. We’re just exploring what that might look like and what we’d need to make that happen.
How do you fund the Repair Cafe?
The repair cafe in Belfast doesn’t require any funding and we’re conscious about keeping it like that.
We’re exploring opportunities that sit outside of it, such as development work with communities outside Belfast and how we might support skill sharing and development so that people can repair more of their stuff. Our biggest challenge is finding time to respond to the interest in what we are doing so generating income and accessing funding would really help us to share our learning and extend our community.
Belfast City Council gave us £3,000 to run a conference exploring community responses to preventing waste in March 2019. It was called Buried Treasure: rethinking waste and building community. We had three brilliant speakers talking about repair and reuse café to an audience of around 100 people from a range of sectors. We also took the opportunity to talk about what we have learned running the repair café to an audience of around 100 people from a range of sectors. It was a great success for us and it helped us to reflect on how far we had come.
How will Brexit affect what you do?
Interestingly, our Buried Treasure event happened on March 22, which, at the time, was a week away from Brexit. There were concerns about around potential civil unrest that we discussed when we were planning the event. Brexit obviously has very particular implications for Northern Ireland, but these remain to be seen.
The policy context could change. Councils are conscious of EU limits around waste and consequences for not meeting particular targets but people within local government that we have worked with also recognise that this not just about compliance with EU target, but that we need to create less waste.
What would you say to someone looking to do something similar?
Just do it. Don’t think about it too much and freak yourself out.
But do it with intention. And take care with what you’re creating.
