Repair Cafés are free meeting places and they’re all about repairing things (together). In the place where a Repair Café is located, you’ll find tools and materials to help you make any repairs you need. On clothes, furniture, electrical appliances, bicycles, crockery, appliances, toys, et cetera. You’ll also find expert volunteers, with repair skills in all kinds of fields.

There are more than 2,500 Repair Cafés worldwide, and some are hosted by libraries. For example, this summer we featured a Repair Café organized at the Vilnius County Adomas Mickevičius Public Library in Lithuania. The concept of libraries as non-consumption spaces, combined with their role as community gathering places, aligns perfectly with the mission of a Repair Café.

Visitors bring their broken items from home. Together with the specialists they start making their repairs in the Repair Café. It’s an ongoing learning process. If you have nothing to repair, you can enjoy a cup of tea or coffee. Or you can lend a hand with someone else’s repair job. You can also get inspired at the reading table – by leafing through books on repairs and DIY.

Recently, the Repair Café International Foundation invited us to participate in its fourth global Repair Café Survey. This survey explores how Repair Cafés operate in practice. If you are organizing a Repair Café at your library and would like to share your rules, policies, and the most important developments, please take a look at the survey:

  • If you intend to complete the survey but cannot do it now, please please click here to enable us to expect your response.
  • To start the survey (you can save your answers and return later), click here.
  • If you do NOT intend to take part in the survey, it would help to let us know why by clicking here

The closing date is 7th December 2025. If you have any questions, please contact the researchers by emailing repaircaferesearch@outlook.com

Additionally, if you’re interested in setting up a repair café in your library, here you can find resources and guides to get started.

Photos Laura Vegter

facebookShare on Facebook
TwitterTweet
FollowFollow us
PinterestGuardar