Farnham Repair Cafe receives the King's Award for Voluntary Service at Farnham Town Hall on January 10, 2025.
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00:00It is a great honour to welcome you to Farnham Tunnel this evening for a very special event
00:21as the Farnham Repair Café volunteers receive their significant honour of the King's Award
00:29of Voluntary Service. This accolade is a testament to your remarkable dedication, partial and
00:37unwavering commitment to making our local community a better place.
00:41I'm so pleased to be able to be with you to present this very special award, which
00:50these awards, these King's Awards for Voluntary Service are not given out like smarties.
00:58There are only nine in Surrey this year and when you think of all the thousands of charities
01:06that are doing wonderful work in the county, for you to be one of those nine is quite something
01:15and I hope it really makes you very proud. So congratulations on that, on the award.
01:25At the University of the Creative Arts, I miss a trick by not bringing in something that needs fixing.
01:32Every time I visit the Repair Café I make sure I bring something. So first of all, I'm absolutely delighted
01:40to be here and thank you Martin for inviting me to say a few words. I'd like to express my congratulations
01:46to you all, particularly the volunteers that make this work, the trustees that oversee and obviously
01:52the founders of the charity. This award is a testament to the amazing work that takes place
01:59and I am absolutely proud to say that as part of the community, as a Farnham resident, when I come down
02:07I bring something along and I make sure I get something fixed so I can actually vouch for the work that takes place.
02:15So it's brilliant. As the Member of Parliament for Farnham and Borden, which obviously covers Farnham,
02:20it's a real source of pride to me and I think a slight bore to everyone else I speak to in the House of Parliament
02:28that I continue talk about how wonderful the volunteer sector and volunteers in my constituency are.
02:35I'm absolutely unashamed that I bore my colleagues to death about the wonderful work that everybody does here in this constituency.
02:44When visitors drive into Farnham, they see a sign that says Farnham, a craft town.
02:50And of course that has a historic meaning, obviously, but it also has a real present meaning,
02:56both in terms of the wonderful work that goes on, not just at the University, but across Farnham,
03:03but also I think embodied in what goes on in the Repair Café.
03:08Real skills that people still have repairing stuff.
03:12So if you come into the Repair Café, either in mufti or with a chain around my neck on a regular basis,
03:19I've known Martin for a long time and I've seen this just expand and expand.
03:24And the place buzzes, it really does.
03:27You know, it's nice to see people sort of almost queuing out on the door
03:31and to see it grow and develop and to see the intense work that, again, volunteers and volunteers put into it is amazing.
03:40I mean, when you read a mayor's description, it's strictly boring, like chairing council and being the conscience and being impartial.
03:48But the real job of a mayor is to go around and say thank you to people who very often don't get thanked.
03:55And I'm sure you guys get thanked by the people who bring their things in,
03:59but I doubt if, you know, you said to someone, oh, I'm at the Repair Café,
04:04they probably wouldn't spark the way they should and say, gosh, yes, what a wonderful thing to be doing.
04:10You know, you're inspiring people not to throw stuff away.
04:14You're fixing things that people think might not be fixable.
04:19You're a wonderful crowd of people with a great guy at the helm.
04:23Thank you for what you're doing and please carry on.
04:26Thank you very much.
04:28And most importantly for this, for the volunteers and the trustees for making this happen,
04:35just say a few words.
04:38Absolutely, repair cafes are about repair, but they're absolutely about community.
04:44The social dimension is absolutely key to this.
04:48I think it's almost the next dimension of repair cafes to start to monitor the impact we're having on people's lives.
04:56We know that some people just come in to have a chat and almost the repair is an excuse.
05:02So there's a very strong social dimension because people feel it's a positive environment to be involved in.
05:12So it's about what it says on the tin, but also about community.
05:17If I sort of take myself back to how it all started,
05:21I was in the Hanover Fair and I jumped out of the presentation on something that was very boring.
05:26And I suddenly thought that somebody had been involved in sustainability for some time.
05:32Oh, repair cafes are really interesting.
05:34So I approached the founder of the repair cafe movement and said, well, can we do the first global survey?
05:41And she said yes.
05:43And that led us to understanding what was going on in 2014.
05:48And then we decided then to work with a local charity to get something up and running.
05:55At that stage in the back end of 2014, nobody had really done it.
06:00So my experience from other projects said we need to do a test.
06:03So we did a couple of tests and then Peter got involved very early on and a few other people then joined up.
06:10And we got our logo designed and all the classic things.
06:14And then we said, we're going to launch it at Christmas.
06:17No, we're too early. Give it another month of testing.
06:20And in February 2015, we launched.
06:25And effectively, we continued to grow right up to COVID.
06:33And with the amazing sort of skill set we had, we were able to when we were able to run events, we ran.
06:42I checked the numbers during 21 to 22.
06:46We still ran 11 sessions even during COVID times.
06:50We adapted our model.
06:51We developed an online model to book people in individually and tagged bags, products in the appropriate manner.
07:00So we kept going and we adapted.
07:03And essentially, we came back and we used that time to also new repairers came on board and new volunteers.
07:10And I think it just shows not just the amazing skills, it's also the adaptability.