CULTIVATE Creative Practitioners Jeni Reid and Kirsty McKeown are launching their first Little Green Repair Café in Forfar.

CULTIVATE is a regional leadership programme for Creative Practitioners and Local Communities to collaboratively explore new ways of embedding creativity at the core of grassroots collective action for climate justice, across the Tay region. Read more about the programme’s ambition and progress in this blog.

For the past seven months, Jeni and Kirsty have been collaborating with social enterprise Community First, to explore new ways of tackling food insecurity, food waste and fast fashion within the Forfar community. Duo Jen and Kirsty are delighted to be launching the first of (hopefully) many repair cafés, which are open to anyone–whether you need little sewing or mending repairs, have skills to share or simply fancy a chat over a cuppa!

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The Little Green Repair Café takes place on Sat 9 April, from 11:30am – 2:30pm, at the newly opened Little Green Café run by Community First in Forfar. Drop in for a repair, a demonstration or a blether via the entrance at the back of S-Mart, on Myreside Road (beside the Royal Hotel car park) in Forfar.

Come along if you have clothes languishing in a cupboard that only need simple repairs to make them wearable again! Things like replacing buttons, fixing zips or hemming trousers can be done while you enjoy what is on offer at the café, from homemade lunches such as baked potatoes, soup, toasties and cakes using food from their Social Supermarket that has been diverted from landfill.

Anyone bringing an item for repair on the day will get a £1 voucher to put towards their order in the café!

There will also be drop-in demonstrations of other simple fixes that can be done at home, as well as demonstrations of how to repurpose unwanted clothing into a tote bag. Jeni and Kirsty’s hope is that this will create an interest in learning and sharing these skills, making this repair event the first of many to be hosted by Community First, and encouraging people to repair and reuse their items instead seeing them as waste. 

They’re also keen to meet local people who have repair skills and are keen to put them on good use for the Forfar community–they’d love to hear from you, so if you can, come along this Saturday for a chat!

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Based in Angus, CULTIVATE’s Community Partner Community First is not-for-profit, social enterprise who aim to be a force for good, supporting people to make the changes they want in their local communities and their own lives. 

Find out more about S-Mart via their Facebook (@socialsupermarketangus), Twitter (@s_martscot) and Instagram (@s.martscot).

Read more about Jeni and Kirsty’s CULTIVATE collaboration in Forfar, in this previous blog: Food for Thought on Climate Justice

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CULTIVATE is a pilot project, which engages communities with Climate Justice through creativity and peer-education. We’ll be sharing more insights into each of our first six Creative Practitioner commissions over the coming months.

Creative Dundee is part of Culture Collective, a network of 26 participatory arts projects, shaped by local communities alongside artists and creative organisations. Funded by Scottish Government emergency COVID-19 funds through Creative Scotland.

The Culture Collective programme has the potential to place creative practise right at the heart of a just transition and help shape the future of local cultural life, which will impact massively the way we embrace creativity and culture in Scotland.