How a volunteer program earned Maple Ridge international fame

The slides for a presentation flashed on her screen, one at a time. 

It offered suggestions and outlined the history of an international movement that has taken root in Maple Ridge, as well as a surprise for Leanne Koehn.

In 2018, Koehn founded Maple Ridge’s Repair Café, a monthly pop-up event where residents can bring items — which may have otherwise been thrown in the trash — to be fixed by a volunteer.

It was a fine initiative, but it wasn’t until last summer when she virtually attended an international conference featuring volunteers from cafés in 25 different countries that she realized how much they were repairing.

As a presenter started talking about the importance of data collection, a process where individual Repair Cafés input the items they fixed into an internal server, Koehn saw her local shop named as one of the most efficient cafés in the world. 

“This slide goes by and it was my husband who noticed and said, ‘Does that say Maple Ridge?’” Koehn said. “I took a screenshot with my phone as I was watching.”

Last month, Maple Ridge was named as the seventh most productive Repair Café of all time. 

It was also the first North American-based café to be named to the list. The top six café’s all hailed from the Netherlands, the place where the Repair Café movement initially began as a way to reduce waste sent to landfills back in 2009. 

There were two other cafés on the list that didn’t originate in the Netherlands. They were both based in the U.K. (Also, not every café has used the international Repair Café’s internal repair monitor tracker for the duration of their existences, which may skew official tallies.)

The distinction comes for a location that didn’t officially open until 2018, nearly one decade after the movement began. 

The Maple Ridge Repair Café has fixed almost 2,500 items over the past six years. 

“I was like, ‘What! No?’” Koehn said of the top-10 honour. “The Netherlands is where everything originated, they’ve been doing this since 2009 and we didn’t start until a good nine years later.” 

There are now more than 2,500 Repair Cafés across the world. Although the initiatives are primarily aimed at reducing landfill waste, they are also designed to teach repair skills and shift consumer habits from a “throw away” mindset to one of reuse and recycle. 

“It’s a concept that I think is very easy for people to grasp,” said Koehn, who also serves as the community engagement manager for the Ridge Meadows Recycling Society. “Everybody has stuff that breaks and they don’t know what to do with it. It’s hard nowadays, there’s not many repair shops left.” 

The amount of solid waste generated in Canada increased by 17 per cent from 2002 to 2022, according to data from the federal government. 

In Metro Vancouver, specifically, a region that has diverted about 63 per cent of waste from landfills since 2015, an initial target to divert 80 per cent of waste from landfills was reduced to 65 per cent last year, following years of stagnant growth. 

The environmental benefits of hosting cafés was a source of inspiration for Koehn to start up a shop in Maple Ridge. But she was also motivated to connect residents — seniors especially — who may be lonely or isolated to a recurring event to show off their skills and do something beneficial for the community. 

“This draws them out with this ragtag group of fixers who are very tenacious, know how to do things with their hands and want to contribute,” she said. 

“We have very overqualified volunteers.” 

Volunteering is part of the fabric of Maple Ridge, Koehn says.  

There are multiple social organizations where residents take a lead on everything from environmental issues, choir performances to the health of seniors.

The town is a community-first city, filled with people who have many skills and are willing to get behind a cause they believe in. Every month, about half of the café’s 50 volunteers show up to fix new items — something that illustrates the city’s willingness to get behind an important social cause. 

“I’ve heard tales that the volunteer rate in Maple Ridge is quite high,” Koehn said. “I think there’s already a mentality of people doing things for the community. And this is a thing that would appeal to maybe a specific part of our residents.” 

The success of the café in recent years has also led to the creation of other local cafés, Koehn added. Municipalities, including Coquitlam, reached out to Maple Ridge to ask questions and gain advice for starting their own café. 

“We’ve hosted lots of people and I’ve had lots of phone conversations, email chats about what we do,” said Koehn, who added that she’s given talks at Metro Vancouver and Recycling Council BC to talk about the initiative. 

Over the years, items that have been repaired in Maple Ridge have ranged from jeans to a dancing Santa Claus figurine. 

But it’s the items that have a unique backstory that inspire Koehn to continue running the cafés along with her day job. 

A couple years ago, one resident brought a ceramic coaster to the café. The fixers, and Koehn, didn’t think much of it at the time — but after the little square item was glued back together, the team found out it was a possession that reminded the resident of their home country. 

“It was part of a house plate from their home in Czechoslovakia, and one of the few things they were able to take with them,” Koehn said. 

“You just never know what’s behind items.” 

The next Repair Café is slated for Oct. 19 at the Maple Ridge Library.