About us

What are we?  Where are we?

We are the Repair Café for Jersey (Channel Islands), a community initiative run by a joint group of over 80 volunteers to help fellow Islanders repair their broken household items - FREE!  Events usually held every 3 weeks.

The Repair Café movement started in the Netherlands in 2009 when journalist Martine Postma decided that she wanted to do something about all the 'stuff' that we throw away each year instead of repairing.  In 2010 she started the World's first Repair Café in Amsterdam.  

Jumping forward 10 years, our very own Max Livesey (left) proposed the idea in St. Brelade, Jersey and with the help of Simon Langlois, we launched the St. Brelade Repair Café in October 2020 on International Repair Day.   A week later, with our band of volunteer repairers and helpers, we ran our first Repair Café event, and it went really well. 

In May 2022, having seen the success of the St. Brelade Repair Café, Jennifer Bridge in Grouville contacted us to find out how to start one in the east of the Island.  We were delighted and helped her to start the Grouville Repair Café.  With Jennifer Bridge and Mike Panter organising events, they built up a great team of volunteers.

From the start, we had always envisaged having 3 repair cafés to cover the Island - west, east and town, each covering about a third of the 100k+ population.  

In April 2023, Max, with a now established team of volunteers, ran the first St. Helier Repair Café at Janvrin School with help from the Head, Iain George and some of the PTA.  

We continued to spread the word about this growing community initiative, making the most of any publicity opportunities.

The 3 Repair Cafés took it in turns to run events throughout the year, and started to go 'on the road' touring all the other parishes, which proved popular, 2023 being particularly busy with over 30 events.

After a while, we found that, as we were sharing the same volunteers, tools, equipment, spares, website, Instagram, admin and much more.  To simplify and rationalise our 3 groups, it made sense to join forces and jointly rename as the Jersey Repair Café.

Five years on, we've held almost 70 Repair Café events, and over the last couple of years, we’ve visited every parish in the Island.  We've been made very welcome, so we're looking forward to continuing to go ‘on tour’, in addition to running our 'home' parish events, and spreading the message.  

Fix it, don’t ditch it – join the repair revolution!

We're always looking for volunteers, so do have a think if there's anything you could help with.  Come along for a chat and a cuppa, and see what it's all about - You'll be most welcome. 🙂

SOCIAL - to bridge the generation gap by bringing all age groups together in a social, constructive and educational setting, and to bring parishioners together in general with a common purpose.

ENVIRONMENTAL  - to help the Island reduce its waste and reduce its carbon footprint by giving Parishioners an option to disposing of faulty items and replacing them with new ones, when they could be repaired, reused or repurposed.
(Latest data requested 3/1/24)

EDUCATIONAL - to encourage people to see and learn how to repair things, and to give them the knowledge and confidence to repair things themselves in future, rather than automatically disposing of them and replacing them, because ‘repair would probably cost more than a new one.’