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 honor to welcome you to Farnham Town Hall this evening for a very special
00:17event as the Farnham Repair Café volunteers receive their certificate of the King's Award
00:27Voluntary Service.
00:29This accolade is a testament to your remarkable dedication, partial and unwavering commitment
00:36to making our local community a better place.
00:39I'm so pleased to be able to be with you to present this very special award, which
00:50the King's Award Voluntary Service are not given out like smarties.
00:56There are only nine in Surrey this year and when you think of all the thousands of charities
01:04that are doing wonderful work in the county, for you to be one of those nine is quite something
01:13and I hope it really makes you very proud.
01:18So congratulations on that, on the award.
01:23I'm also at the University of Creative Arts.
01:26I miss a trick by not bringing in something that needs fixing.
01:31Every time I visit the Repair Café I make sure I bring something.
01:35So first of all I'm absolutely delighted to be here and thank you Martin for inviting
01:40me to say a few words.
01:42I'd like to express my congratulations to you all, particularly the volunteers that
01:46make this work, the trustees that oversee and obviously the founders of the charity.
01:53This award is testament to the amazing work that takes place and I am absolutely proud
02:01to say that as part of the community, as a farm resident, when I come down I bring something
02:06along and I make sure I get something fixed so I can actually vouch for the work that
02:13takes place, so it's brilliant.
02:15As the Member of Parliament for Farnham and Borden, which obviously covers Farnham, it's
02:18a real source of pride to me and I think a slight bore to everyone else I speak to in
02:25the House of Parliament, that I continue to talk about how wonderful the volunteer sector
02:31and volunteers in my constituency are.
02:34I'm absolutely unashamed that I bore my colleagues to death about the wonderful work that everybody
02:40does here in this constituency.
02:43When visitors drive into Farnham they see a sign that says Farnham a craft town and
02:49of course that has a historic meaning obviously but it also has a real present meaning, both
02:55in terms of the wonderful work that goes on not just at the University but across Farnham
03:01but also I think embodied in what goes on in the Repair Café.
03:07Real skills that people still have repairing skills.
03:11So if you come into the Repair Café either in mufti or with a chain around my neck on
03:16a regular basis, I've known Martin for a long time and I've seen this just expand and expand
03:22and the place buzzes, it really does.
03:26It's nice to see people almost queuing out on the door and to see it grow and develop
03:32and to see the intense work that again volunteers and volunteers put into it is amazing.
03:38I mean when you read a Mayor's description it's dreadfully boring like chairing council
03:43and being the conscience and being impartial but the real job of a Mayor is to go round
03:49and say thank you to people who very often don't get thanked.
03:53And I'm sure you guys get thanked by the people who bring their things in but I doubt if you
04:00said to someone I'm at the Repair Café they probably wouldn't spark the way they should
04:05and say gosh yes what a wonderful thing to be doing.
04:08You're inspiring people not to throw stuff away.
04:13You're fixing things that people think might not be fixable.
04:18You're a wonderful crowd of people with a great guy at the helm.
04:22Thank you for what you're doing and please carry on.
04:25Thank you very much.
04:27And most importantly for this for the volunteers and the trustees for making this happen
04:34I'll just say a few words.
04:37Absolutely Repair Cafés are about repair but they're absolutely about community and
04:43the social dimension is absolutely key to this.
04:46I think it's almost the next dimension of Repair Cafés to start to monitor the impact
04:52we're having on people's lives.
04:54But we know that some people just come in to have a chat and all that's the repair
05:00is an excuse.
05:01So there's that very strong social dimension because people feel it's a positive environment
05:08to be involved in.
05:10So it's about what it says on the tin but also about community.
05:15If I sort of take myself back to how it all started I was in the Hanover Fair and I jumped
05:22out of a presentation on something that was very boring and I suddenly thought that somebody
05:27had been involved in the sustainability area for some time.
05:30Oh Repair Cafés are really interesting.
05:32So I approached the founder of the Repair Café movement and said well can we do the
05:37first global survey?
05:39And everyone does and she said yes.
05:41And that led us to understanding what was going on in 2014 and then we decided then
05:49to work with a local charity to get something up and running.
05:53At that stage in the back end of 2014 nobody had really done it so my experienced mother
05:59project said we need to do a test.
06:01And we did a couple of tests and then Peter got involved very early on and a few other
06:07people then joined up and we got our logo designed and all the classic things and then
06:14we thought we're going to launch it Christmas.
06:16No, too early.
06:17Give it another month of testing and in February 2015 we launched.
06:23And effectively we continued to grow right up to COVID and with the amazing sort of skillset
06:36we had we were able to, when we were able to run events, we ran, I checked the numbers
06:42during 21 to 22, we still ran 11 sessions even during COVID times.
06:48We adapted our model, we developed an online model to book people in individually and tagged
06:54and bagged products in the appropriate manner.
06:58So we kept going and we adapted.
07:02And essentially we came back and we used that title so new repairers came on board and new
07:08volunteers and I think it just shows not just the amazing skills, it's also the adaptability.