Repair Café International
Every time we fix something together, we join thousands of other Repair Cafés doing the same thing. Here is the whole family, on one map.
Loading Repair Cafés from around the world…
Where it started
The first Repair Café was held in Amsterdam on 18 October 2009. Martine Postma, a Dutch journalist, wanted to show that repairing things is practical, sociable and worth doing. People brought broken lamps, clothes and bicycles, and volunteers helped them fix the items themselves.
The idea spread quickly. In 2011 the Repair Café International Foundation was set up to help other groups start their own. It is a non-profit organisation based in the Netherlands. It does not run the local cafés. Instead it gives new groups the advice, materials and shared name they need to get going.
Every Repair Café is run by local volunteers and makes its own decisions. What we share is the idea: bring a broken thing, sit down with someone who knows how to fix it, and learn something while you are there. Nothing is thrown away that could have been saved.
2009
The first Repair Café, in Amsterdam.
2011
The foundation starts helping new groups.
Thousands
Repair Cafés listed around the world today.
Our place in it
We are one of the pins on that map. We run our own sessions, keep our own volunteers and raise our own funds, and we follow the same simple idea as everyone else on the map.
If you are travelling, or you live somewhere else, use the map above to find a Repair Café near you. If there is not one yet, you can start one. The foundation has a starter kit and will help you set it up.
Café locations come from the Repair Café location API and are refreshed once a day. Some cafés are listed without a map position, so the map shows slightly fewer than the total.