Hi, I’m going to Warsaw for a week next monday - 6th of November.
In Repair Café Denmark we always try to strengthening our connections across Europe.
It seems like the repair café movement is not super strong in Poland, but I have set up a meeting with Polskie Stowarzyszenie Zero Waste, who runs a monthly repair café in Warsaw.
Are you aware of any other organisation or individuals, which might be interesting to connect with in the area. I’m willing to travel to another city for a great meeting, but otherwise I will be staying in the capital area.
I checked in the list of groups in Restarters - and we don’t have any groups added from Poland. Nor did we have any events listed for Repair Day in Poland.
There are 2 groups from Poland listed at https://www.repaircafe.org/en/visit/ - in Pila and Katowice. Neither very close to Warsaw! But perhaps if you contact them they might know of other organisations.
And… looking at the list of members of the Right to Repair Europe Campaign, the only large organisation currently a member from Poland is Polskie Stowarzyszenie Zero Waste
In addition to what Neil said, Ashoka Poland started a repair cafe network with Veolia a few years ago. I believe they started 10 repair cafés with the aim of expanding this number across Poland. I’m not sure what the latest is, as I haven’t heard from them for a while. But it might be worth a look:
Thanks for both of the suggestions @james and @neil.
I have reached out to all of the organisation mentioned and will update on this post after the my return to Denmark again
Thank you for reminding me @neil Before I left Repair Café Denmarks board, I made a small report about the situation in Poland… but forgot about Restarers. I will try my best to keep it short.
In November I had a meeting with Agata Zgliczynska from Zero Waste Poland. They had hosted 2 - 3 repair cafés in Poland. This was done with professional fixers who repaired for people. They said it was difficult to host these events, since they needed to raise 2.000 € to have money for salaries and marketing per event. Agata told me, that Polish people didn’t volunteer since they were overworked. She also said that people in general didn’t want to join free events, because it was looked upon as being for “poor people”. Two women from Centrum Aktywizmu Klimatycznego were part of the meeting. They agreed that volunteers was not a concept that exists in Poland. In addition to this meeting, I also had a short e-mail correspondence with the repair café in Piła, which were not active anymore.
The above state is not true though. I have now spend the past 3 months in Warsaw and I can tell that volunteering and joining free events is huge in Warsaw. There are two important concept which one have to learn about: “Dom Kultury” and “MAL” (Meet your neighbours). These two type of culture houses hosts a range of events and could be a perfect place for repair cafés.
For the past 3 month I have hosted a repair café every Tuesday in MAL Grójecka 109. The repair café concept is quite new here, but people like to join them when they first understand the idea. Yesterday we had a bike focused event with around 15 first time guests. There is a lot of funding for doing events at the MAL’s so tools can easily be bought. As I will spend more time here in Warsaw, I plan to see how many repair cafés I can start up within the next year.
If you are thinking about doing any cross-border projects or Interreg applications, I might be able to take the Polish side of things. I don’t speak Polish, but I am quite good at navigating in and around the language situation.
Thanks for the insights @Andreas ! And great to hear that you’re hosting a repair cafe in Warsaw. We’ll keep on the lookout for any potential projects.
Before I left Repair Café Denmarks board, I made a small report about the situation in Poland… but forgot about Restarers. I will try my best to keep it short.
In addition to this meeting, I also had a short e-mail correspondence with the repair café in Piła, which were not active anymore.