Here at Stitched Up we were super excited to launch Manchester’s first Repair Café in July.
A Repair Café is a FREE monthly meetup for people who want to repair broken things. It’s run by volunteers, who help you to repair your items by teaching you rather than doing it for you. You get to learn new skills, while hanging out with a fab bunch of people AND saving items from landfill.
The Manchester Repair Café takes place at Stitched Up HQ in Chorlton on the third Saturday of the month and is open to anybody.
The first year of the project has been funded by Comic Relief via Forever Manchester and, thanks to our wonderful community, has got off to a brilliant start. In just four short months we have reached over 180 likes on our Facebook page, and have a team of 10 pasionate volunteers helping out regularly. At this month’s event our awesome volunteers fixed (or advised on fixing) a frying pan, a bike, a hoover, a running jersey, a sewing machine and a laptop!
However, for the next part WE NEED YOUR HELP.
Project funding runs out in July 2017. So in order to continue building this brilliant community of repairers in Manchester, we’ve entered the Aviva Community Fund competition to secure the future of the Manchester Repair Café for a further two years.
The first stage of the competition is a public vote – that’s where YOU come in! Voting opens today, and ends on 18th November. You can vote for us by visiting this page. Each person can cast 10 votes – you choose whether to spend all of those votes on one project, or vote for a number of projects.
Projects receiving the most votes get shortlisted. Then from this shortlist of 30 projects judges will select the winners. Results will be announced on 10 January 2017.
Please vote for Manchester Repair Café!
The money will go to pay our overheads including rent and heating, volunteer expenses, as well as an outreach budget so that we can spread the word about the project to harder-to-reach communities in Manchester. We’d also use the money to create a regular podcast from the event, so we can inspire people beyond Manchester to get involved with or set up a local Repair Café themselves.
Please vote for another two years of the Manchester Repair Cafe, and spread the word amongst friends and family too by sharing the direct link to our voting page:
https://community-fund.aviva.co.uk/voting/project/view/16-1949
Find out more about Manchester Repair Café via the Facebook page
Huge thanks for all your support!
Stitched Up x
