On Friday, 18 October, it will be exactly 15 years ago that the very first Repair Café was held, in Amsterdam. On this occasion, the Open Repair Alliance has published a detailed report: “The rise of community repair: the people and the data building a movement“.
Since the first Repair Café, community repair has grown and spread around the world. The report delves deep into the data that Repair Cafés and other community repair groups have collected over the years.
Showing that repair is possible and can be great fun
“This report shows what we, as a global movement, have reached in 15 years”, says Martine Postma of Repair Café International. “We estimate that over 4,000 community repair groups are now active globally, performing 190,000 successful repairs per year. Also, these volunteers contribute to the resilience of their community, by sharing their skills and showing their fellow citizens that repair is possible, need not be difficult or expensive and can be great fun.”
“Of course, our work is not done yet. This report also goes into the barriers that we still need to overcome. We need more repairable products and stronger legislation to support repair”, Martine stresses.
International collaboration of community repair networks
The Open Repair Alliance is an international collaboration of community repair networks. It was co-founded by Repair Café International and four other organisations in 2017. The ORA combines datasets collected by its members and draws important conclusions about the durability and repairability of our every-day products from this data. Over the last 15 years, hundreds of thousands of items have been repaired by volunteers, and more than 200,000 repair attempts have been logged in the combined ORA dataset.
The data helps the fight for the right to repair in many ways: providing evidence of barriers to repair that need to be removed, but also showing the growing enthusiasm and sense of urgency among the public for repairing your own stuff and using less of the world’s natural resources.
More information
- Download the report from the Open Repair Alliance website
- Read facts and figures about the growth of the worldwide community repair movement
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