www.repaircafewales.org

Overview

Repair Cafe Wales (RCW) is a Community Interest Company that facilitates pop-up events, offering training and advice to encourage communities that want to work towards a more circular economy, creating a culture of repair and re-use, directly addressing the ever-growing emergency of unsustainable growth in landfill and waste. 

Born in Wales, but not just for Wales, communities around the UK continue to join the RCW umbrella, united by our vision of a society empowered to work together to reduce waste, share skills, and strengthen our communities. 

Our network of repair cafés provide a diverse range of benefits to the communities in which they are embedded: 

• Creative opportunities to engage with re-energising town centres and developing zero waste towns. 
• Potential routes to employment by supporting formalised training and digital inclusion projects. 
• Provide data that feeds into product design improvement. As the Welsh Government’s ‘Prosperity for All: A Low Carbon Wales’ plan argues ‘Better design assists in creating products that are durable and easy to repair, upgrade or remanufacture’. 
• Provide a wide variety of volunteering opportunities, which supports intergenerational activity. 
• Creates safe and inclusive spaces that support community development and improve health and wellbeing. 

Our Values 

Waste Reduction

RCW takes items usually destined for landfill, and using methods such as repairing, recycling, repurposing or upcycling, we preserve those items for as long as possible, so that they may still be useful. This reduces the volume of raw materials and energy needed to manufacture new products, cutting CO2 emissions as a result.

Community Cohesion

RCW promotes social cohesion and resilience in the community, facilitating low-key but inspirational events, at which people from diverse backgrounds, with various motivations for attending, can connect with each other. We work to address social issues such as poverty, loneliness and isolation, repairing items that would usually have to be replaced at a cost, and supplying safe and inclusive spaces that support community development and improve health and wellbeing. We work to bring the community together irrespective of a person’s race, gender or cultural background.

Skill Sharing and Development 

RCW recognises the value of people with practical skills in our community, and the potential for those skills to be shared. We promote the concept of a repair culture by inviting members of the public to learn a skill from our experienced volunteer repairers, or through more formalised training. Our objective is to reskill or upskill members of society, increasing that person’s employability.