It was a family affair at our Ōtaki Repair Café in March.
Volunteers' kids became volunteers themselves - racing to share out kai.
4 year old Jacob set up his own fixing unit, for mending "rocks and togs".
Teenager Ari helped repair an e-scooter.
And father and son duo David and Chris repaired sewing machines (as they do for 5 other Repair Cafés around the region!).
All together, the extended Repair whānau volunteered a whopping 165 hours to repair items including lamps, a keyboard, hairdryers, a grass trimmer, blenders, and a 20 year old DVD player with a jammed door.
Handbags were fixed, jewellery was restored.
Bikes and knives - especially knives! - were the hottest items. (Next Café, in response to visitor requests, the team will set up a table for learning how to sharpen tools.)
All up, 138 items were repaired. Meaning they needn't be chucked out.
Effectively preventing 832kg of broken belongings from clogging up landfill.
That’s like stopping 7.5 tonnes of CO2 emissions from going into Earth’s atmosphere and adding to the climate crisis.
Which does the same work as growing 113 trees for 10 years.
That's what you call a healthy return on investment. May those returns, like Janice's favourite shirt - repaired for the third time at Ōtaki Repair Café (below) - keep coming back.
