The Orillia Repair Café Welcomes Students

— by Courtney Perry

When people think about social work, they often picture counselling, hospitals, or child welfare. Social work also happens at the community level. Sometimes it looks like people gathering in a church hall with a broken lamp, a torn jacket, a small appliance that has stopped working, and a group of neighbours, willing to see if it can be fixed.

This year, our group of five Honours Bachelor of Social Work students from Lakehead University’s Orillia campus has the opportunity to work alongside Sustainable Orillia on the Orillia Repair Café project. Through the experience, we are exploring something that can be difficult to fully appreciate in a classroom: how community programs are developed, sustained and strengthened over time.

Developed by a Dutch activist in the Netherlands in 2009, the Repair Café initiative has gone international. Created to combat “throwaway culture” and help people develop hands-on skills, the initiative was brought to Orillia in 2018 by a different group of Social Work students. At its most visible, the idea is simple: instead of throwing something away when it breaks, bring it to the Repair Café and see whether a volunteer can help give it another life. Once you spend time evaluating the program, it becomes clear that much more is happening. People are sharing knowledge and practical skills. Community members are saving money by repairing rather than replacing household items. Volunteers are contributing skills that might otherwise have few opportunities to be passed along.

Tim and Rhonda Lauer have been Repair Cafe volunteers and participants for years. Tim is a repairman and Rhonda works the weigh scale. “I am always amazed at the variety of items, big and small that get repaired, the people’s delight in that something was fixed and the size of the accumulated weight that is diverted from the landfill site,” says Rhonda. Tim, when he is not helping with tinkering and mending, makes use of other services available. “For three years now, the happy volunteer sewers have breathed new life into one of my favourite pairs of work pants,” Tim says. “A couple of patches and the pants are good to go — again!”

Often, community development begins with recognizing strengths that already exist within a community and finding ways to bring people, knowledge, and resources together. Social workers are also encouraged to ask, “What is already here, and how can we build on it?” The Repair Café embodies that approach.

Our role as students is also giving us an opportunity to see the less visible side of community programming. An event that appears simple on the day requires considerable planning behind the scenes. There are relationships to maintain, volunteers to coordinate, community partners to engage, goals to define and practical decisions to make about how a program can continue to meet the needs of the people it serves.

As part of our project, our group is looking at the Repair Café through a community-development and evaluation lens. We are considering questions about the program’s goals, how its impact can be understood and demonstrated, what is working well, and what may help support its continued development. The number of items repaired and the amount of waste diverted are important. So are the relationships created, the skills shared, the volunteers who return, and the feeling that people take away from this important community project.

Join us from 11 am – 3 pm on October 17, 2026 at St. James’ Anglican Church for the fall 2026 Orillia Repair Café!