International Repair Day doubles in size again

This third International Repair Day was the biggest ever, with 260+ events on the day, and over 300 during the weekend. With events on six continents, we were impressed with the sheer dimension of the day. The event has more than doubled in size every year since we started.

Social media impact

We were delighted to see groups in Australia, Benin, India, South Africa, across Europe and North America share photos and smiles from their events.

We also had some lovely DIY, self-repairs shared from Thailand to the UK:

Media coverage

Our Belgian friends got some great coverage for dressing up famous statues as “Repair Heroes”. We got more coverage in non-English language media than English-language media, despite our best efforts. But we did get a piece on the link between repair and climate justice in Open Democracy, as well as a TV report on ITV in the UK.

Businesses participated

iFixit used the day to announce a big opportunity (worth $50,000) for community repair groups to get grants in tools.

We saw repair businesses all over the world participating on social media, and our goal next year is to engage businesses more clearly. A number celebrated their staff. Some offered discounts. We promise to make this a greater priority this year.

(We even saw some manufacturer lobbyists trying to co-opt the day, and promote repair only by their own professionals and scare people about other totally legitimate kinds of repair!)

Repair Day in future

Getting started sooner

Many repair groups plan their calendars WAY in advance. We’ll be in touch much sooner in 2020. But we encourage groups to already save the date, the third Saturday of October, 17 October 2020.

Event data

Working through national community repair networks, we were able to compile event data more easily than ever before. But it still wasn’t easy! We’d like to work towards an international standard for events listing – which we hope all regional and national networks can adhere to. This could be optimised for listing on Google and other sites, and could be used on a year-round basis if we get it right!

Reaching emerging economies… plus space and Antartica

We think there is scope to reach out to organisations promoting Sustainable Development Goal 12: Sustainable Consumption and Production. We’d love to see more events for Repair Day in Africa, Asia and Latin America next year. We’re looking at enlarging the membership and scope of the Alliance in the coming year, so watch this space! And get in touch if this sounds like something you might like to help with.

We were super excited to see the first-ever all-women Space Walk on the eve of Repair Day. It was so great to see women astronauts engaged in repairing a 19-year old battery discharge unit. Next year, we’d love to involve NASA or the ESA in Repair Day. And why not Antartica? In both places, every day is literally Repair Day.

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