Volunteer Repairer

Repair Café Gosport is part of an international movement that empowers people to fix broken things rather than throw them away. We offer a friendly environment for guests and volunteers to socialise and help fix the broken things that have been brought.

Repair Café Gosport hosts events at various locations around Gosport on the second Saturday of the month. These events typically last 3 hours. As of March 2025, 1837kg of things have been fixed rather than thrown away with the help of our volunteers. This is estimated to have saved 15,000kg of CO2 emissions (equivalent to driving a car 125,000 km).

We try to be as flexible as possible with our volunteers. All the repair activity happens at the event and you will not be asked to do anything outside that time. There is no rota, and you will not be asked to commit in advance. Come to one event or every event; the choice will be up to you. Our goal is to ensure that it is a positive experience that means you will want to keep coming back. It is incredibly rewarding to help people fix their broken items, giving people the confidence to try to fix things themselves and avoid having things end up in landfills.

Repair Cafe is not a drop-off service. The emphasis is on demonstrating the process so that guests might be confident about trying it themselves next time.

Skills

We welcome people with all skill levels, and repairers choose which repairs they want to work on. You will never be asked to undertake something you are not confident about. The main skill needed is to work systematically through the problem, explaining the process.

You do not need to be an expert 'DIYer' to volunteer (but we welcome them), if you have ever done any of the following, then you can help:

• descale a coffee machine;
  
• sew up a broken bag;
  
• glue a handle on a mug;
  
• change a damaged plug.

Broken things can be simple to fix or complicated. The simplest repairs may involve helping to find lost instructions on the Internet. Examples of more complex repairs are realigning a bike wheel or changing out a vacuum cleaner component.