By Tanya Steele
A little tinker can do a world of good and a small community organisation in Knox has been given some local government funding to to keep doing just that.
Knox Repair Cafe was awarded a grant from Knox City Council’s community development fund in late July and is striving ahead with the funds after a stellar year of repairs.
In the last year the cafe saved just over 600 kg of waste from landfill and Knox City Council awarded the volunteer run group a 11,000 dollar grant, which it will use to grow its operations out of its two locations in Ferntree Gully and Rowville.
Volunteer coordinator at the Knox Cafe Stephanie Mapleson said that the grant will allow for the development of a new app and help to increase community awareness of the cafe.
“The number one big thing that we wanted to achieve with our funding was to develop an app which would make it easy for people to book a repair at our repair cafe at one of our two locations,” she said.
Ms Mapleson said that as it stands at the moment the cafe doesn’t have a booking system – something the funding will change.
“We have a volunteer called Jim who has very ably established a prototype of the app that we want to develop and launch at the end of our funding,” she said.
Ms Mapleson said that the app will have an interface for users to enter the item they want to be repaired and the venue they want to attend.
“We’ll ask for a few details and they can say which venue they want to attend,” she said.
Volunteer repairs can then be organised through the app to schedule appointments for the clients to attend.
The funding will also be used to expand community relationships and raise awareness of the cafe, along with the provision of free training so people can learn to fix their items at home.
Ms Mapleson said the cafe has held a couple of sewing workshops, a bicycle maintenance workshop, car maintenance, electronics and so on.
“If we do a workshop, we can have several people attending, and they can all learn,” she said.
The Knox Repair team has also paired up with students from Deakin University who are testing and refining the app while it is in development and a bit of social media presentation.
“They’ll hand it back to us for a trial and we’ll trial it with our volunteers,” said Ms Mapleson.
“We’re hoping to launch later this year,” she said.
The Knox Cafe team have hopes that the organisation of around 20 volunteers can continue to grow and help people keep their broken items from landfill.
“We are the only repair cafe in Knox – we’re keen to become part of the Knox waste reduction strategy,” said Ms Mapleson.
The cafe can help people with a range of repair services for items such as clothing, furniture, electronics, and appliances.
The skilled repair experts are passionate about fixing broken items and giving them a new life.
“We’ve got a lot of our fixes on our social media,” said Ms Mapleson.
From a dancing Santa that had stopped grooving to vintage dolls over 70 years old, broken sewing machines, an array of kitchen appliances and more, the repair team have seen some interesting items come through to be fixed.
“Sometimes it’s simply a case of getting all the fluff out of a sewing machine and oiling it so and showing people how to service their own machines, sometimes, it’s a bit more of a mechanical fix,” said Ms Mapleson.
“We have some lovely stories,” she said.
Knox Repair Cafe operates on the second Saturday of the month from 10am–12pm at Knox Environment Society nursery, 1010 Burwood Highway, Ferntree Gully, and on the fourth Saturday of the month from 10am–12pm at Rowville Men’s Shed, Police Road, Rowville.
