REPAIR Cafe Bude celebrated its first birthday on Saturday, February 15, in conjunction with the Big Fix 2020 event.

Although the team experienced some volunteer sickness — plus the wrath of Storm Dennis — the repair cafe still managed a fantastic 30 successful repairs.

Since starting the venture in 2019, which aims to reduce the amount of household waste and promotes the idea of skill sharing in the community, Repair Cafe Bude has completed 203 successful repairs — that is an average of 18.4 items repaired per repair cafe. The number does not include a large amount of items diagnosed, but not repairable on the day, plus confirmed broken items.

In its first year, the repair cafe also experienced 407 visitors coming to the volunteers for help, a staggering 42 visitors per repair cafe.

Repair Cafe Bude has an average of 18 volunteers per repair cafe, which have contributed a whopping 690 hours so far — 62.7 hours of voluntary work every time the repair cafe is held, on a Saturday each month.

Eilidh Maccormick from Repair Cafe Bude said: “We could not have achieved any of this without every one of the volunteers and are so thankful. Also a massive thanks to Neetside Community Centre for their unwavering support for us from the start and kindly providing us with a place to hold it.

“We had hoped when we launched Repair Cafe Bude we would enable people to have their items repaired, rather than throwing them out, and in the process learn new skills and share that knowledge. This has definitely been achieved. We also hoped to enable individuals that had skills to use and share them, which has also been achieved.”

She added: “Repair Cafe Bude has been supported by so many people, organisations and the media.

“We are thankful for this as it enables more people to come and encourage other volunteers to join. I can honestly say it has changed my life for the better. A community helping each other builds a more understanding and resilient one.”