Pitstone Repair Café donates £3,000 to charity
Ivinghoe and Pitstone Repair Cafe has donated £3,000 to charity at a special ceremony.
The charities which benefited included Ivinghoe and Pitstone Food Bank, Ivinghoe and Pitstone Scouts, Aylesbury Food Bank, Workaid (which donates tools and other items to projects in Africa aimed at teaching people trades), and CHUMS (providing a wide range of mental health and emotional wellbeing services) and the Hygiene Bank.
The Hygiene Bank is run by 20 volunteers in the Milton Keynes area who provide help for people in need to keep themselves, their clothes and their homes clean through donations of items at Boots and other companies’ branches and JustGiving donations).
The Repair Cafe, founded just over two years ago at Pitstone Pavilion, is a community-run venture, bringing together volunteers with a variety of skills for people to bring along broken items to get fixed.
Founder Alex Razak, said: “The café was all about promoting sustainability, looking after the environment, and looking to reuse or fix items instead of throwing them away.
“Not only is it still going strong, but it’s gone from strength to strength. The volunteer repairers - from a wide range of disciplines, including engineering, sewers, woodworkers and generalists, see over 60 items in the three hours the café is open, and the repair rate success now stands at 80%.
“We have also become a wonderful community space where people bump into friends and chat to others they have never met, while enjoying quality coffee and homemade snacks, and waiting for their item to be fixed.”
The café is not for profit, but visitors are encouraged to give a donation to cover repairs and refreshments and support local causes.
A spokesperson added: “Since launching in February 2023 the café has established itself as an invaluable part of community life and everyone involved is rightly proud of it and its contribution to saving items from the ever-growing landfill mountain.
"The information about items needing repairs is uploaded to the Repair Café Worldwide Foundation database, so that the café has a record of how many kg of items have been saved from landfill and the volume of CO2 emissions prevented.”