Fancy yourself as a bit of a Mrs or Mr Fix-it?

A group of Lismore residents have put a call out for people to volunteer repairers at a proposed “Repair Cafe”.

Mark Fuller, who is one of those already involved, said the idea wasn’t to repair things for people, it was to repair things with people.

“People visiting the cafe can bring broken stuff from home - toasters, lamps, hair dryers, clothes, bikes, toys, crockery... anything that is broken is welcome,” Mark said.

“The people there as repairers can fix a lot of things and the aim is to keep it out of landfill and keep it in the community.

“We throw away piles of stuff in Australia, even things that have practically nothing wrong with them and a lot of people have forgotten they can actually fix things.

“So ideally, a child would come along and help to repair things and that would normalise fixing things for them.

“And then people can go home and repair other things once they have learned those skills.

“Ultimately, we want people to start asking ‘why don't fix it’ rather than just the default position to throw it away.

“You can go on about the high falutin environmental reasons but above all for me it's just to show people how fun it can be.”

The Repair Cafe movement started in 2009 in Amsterdam and now the Repair Café Foundation helps support repair cafes to start up all around the world. There is already one in Mullumbimby.

“It's not-for-profit and all the repairers are volunteers,” Mark said.

“So at the moment we’re looking for a venue and more volunteer repairers.

“We have the jewellery and metalwork side of things sorted out, clothing and textiles as well and I can do general repairs.

“In an ideal world we'd be looking for someone who is retired or unable to work full-time but able to do some voluntary work who has experience in things like electrics.

“The vast majority of things are electrical items that have broken so that's what we're looking for.”

Mark said he had contacted Lismore City Council - which already has some volunteer repairers who fix broken items at the Revolve Shop - to see what support could be provided.

For more information, check out the Lismore Repair Cafe Facebook page.