Category: Resources

Since fixers are all volunteers willing to help their community, you will want t o protect them from liability, should a object brought for repair get accidentally broken or completely unusable. This is why your welcome desk team should have guests sign a waiver.

Feel free to use the following template as a waiver for your own repair café: copy-paste it into an online form, a word processing document, or whatever medium you will use on the day of the event.

The waiver also includes an authorization for photography / videography. Feel free to remove this section or to keep it if you need it.

Event Process:

• Some organizers choose to print the full waiver for each guest to clearly connect each guest’s signature with the content of the waiver.
• Some organizers have printed the waiver text to make it available to read at the welcome desk and have a paper list of guest’s signatures to save on paper.
• Some organizers have made the waiver available as a fillable form, either on a computer at the welcome table or for guests to fill out on their own device.

It will be up to you to decide how you will handle liability and waivers for your event, but feel free to connect with us and talk through your options.

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NS REPAIRS WAIVER TEMPLATE

Repairs at the Repair Café are offered free of charge by volunteer Repair Specialists. These volunteers help diagnose issues and suggest repair approaches. Whenever possible, visitors are encouraged to carry out repairs themselves, with guidance and hands-on support from our Repair Specialists as needed. This shared approach helps build skills, confidence, and community resilience.

By participating, you acknowledge that neither the organizers nor the Repair Specialists are responsible for any loss, damage, or issues resulting from advice, instructions, or repair work. This waiver does not cancel or reduce any legal rights you may have under consumer protection laws. That means if the law guarantees you certain protections—like safety standards or fair treatment—those rights still apply, even if you sign this document.

Visitors offering broken items for repair do so at their own risk. Repair Specialists offer no guarantee for the repairs carried out with their help and are not liable if objects that are repaired in the Repair Café turn out not to work properly at home.

Repair Specialists are entitled to refuse to repair certain objects.

Repair Specialists are not obliged to reassemble disassembled appliances that cannot be repaired.

Visitors to Repair Café are solely responsible for the tidy removal of broken objects that could not be repaired.

A voluntary donation is greatly appreciated. Any new materials or replacement parts used during repairs may incur a cost to the visitor, depending on availability and value of the part. This will be discussed in advance.

As we learn and grow together, please note that depending on turnout and the availability of our volunteer Repair Specialists, we may not be able to look at every item brought in. We’ll do our best to accommodate as many repairs as possible, but we appreciate your patience and understanding if we can’t get to everything this time. Your participation helps us build a stronger, more sustainable community—thank you for being part of it!

Please indicate your preference regarding photography and videography during the event:

I AGREE to have photos and/or videos taken of me during the Repair Café event. I understand that these images may be used for promotional and marketing purposes to support future Repair Café initiatives in our community.

I DO NOT AGREE to have photos and/or videos taken of me during the Repair Café event. I prefer not to appear in any promotional or marketing materials.

I declare that I have read this agreement/waiver form and agree to the terms that were outlined:

Name:

Date:

Signature:

Organizers connected at NS Repairs continue to explore the question of insurance and liability. We are asking other community organizations and broader repair initiatives such as CanRepair, how they deal with these issues

In the meantime, suggestions for improving this waiver and the process for having guests sign the waiver are welcome.

At Bridgewater’s first Repair Cafe organizers attempted to track the items coming in for repairs by asking volunteers to record incoming items in a list at the Welcome Table.

Observations:

• A lot of information is presented at the welcome table. It’s a lot for the guests to take in, especially their first time.
• When a line-up formed, the welcome desk volunteers began rushing or skipping steps in the intended process.
• Guests often left the welcome desk with only verbal instructions on where to go next and how to engage.
• When items were fixed, only the guest, the fixer, and any immediate onlookers, knew the repair was successful.
• By the end of the event, we had very little information to help us gauge the collective impact of our work.

Suggestions for iterating on this Item Ticket resource:

• Add Check boxes (or a circle from list) for which repair station the item is being directed to. This will give the guests a written reminder of where they have been directed, and will make processing Item Ticket data post event more efficient.
• Add “Ticket number: ____”. Fillable by hand at each event to avoid unnecessary reprinting, this number will help gauge how many tickets are issued during the event, for a sense of realtime feedback to guests and volunteers, adding to the buzz and atmosphere.
• Add “Number of items:____” Even when the instruction is “one item, one ticket” sometimes folks bring multiple and it makes sense to just mark “(x3)” adding this element could make the instruction “one ticket per station” saving paper and clarifying the process for the welcome table volunteers.
• Add, “Please leave this Item Ticket with your Fixer, or at the Exit Table”. Printing instructions for the guests directly to the ticket could minimize the chance of guests taking tickets home, thereby loosing data .
• Add subtle branding (e.g. “NS Repairs” text) to the item ticket to help identify that this is a resource that can be freely replicated and increase the likelihood of a guest checking out the network and becoming an organizer themselves.