Repair Cafe - Front desk team member

Role Description – Repair Café Front desk team member

Mō mātou: About us

Launched in February 2020, The Nelson Tasman Climate Forum is a community-led organisation committed to weaving people together around urgent, strategic climate action. Our group has been holding regular Repair Cafés now for many years.

Role type: Part-time volunteer role working as part of a team that is needed for about 4 ½ hours per month over the 10 months from February to November each year. The role is shared within a team and so attendance every month is not required. The team members manage the roster based on their availability. The position reports to the Repair Café coordinator.

What is a Repair Cafe?: It is a service to support our community to repair their goods, and learn the skills so they can better maintain their items and perhaps learn how to do simple fixes. It is not a café, serving food or drinks, but is providing a service.

Role: Customers bring their items in to be fixed by one of our repair volunteers. The front desk is the customer’s first port of call when arriving. A team member must ask the customer to sign a disclaimer that clarifies our service including that our repairers are volunteers and can not guarantee to fix their item, etc. The disclaimer is signed electronically either through one of the laptops or through the customer scanning the QR code and filling in the form on their own device. Your role will be to help set up the desk area and manage it through the event; liaise with the customer to guide them through this process; record a summary of their information; allocate them a unique card that they will need to present to the repairer; pass them onto the relevant repair team, or manage their position in a queue; and be there to answer questions and look after our customers. Liaising with the repairers may be needed. All customers are encouraged to leave a koha/donation for the service, and your role will include telling them about the koha. The koha is a donation, it is not obligatory, but it’s very important to us to be able to keep running the service. This koha goes towards covering the costs which include: hire of the venue; morning tea for the volunteers; some equipment/tools/parts; cost of qualified repairers if needed to meet legislation, etc.

Location: Currently held monthly at Waa! Club, 183 Bridge Street, Nelson, but subject to change.

Purpose of this position: Support the set up and pack down of the Repair Cafe, working with a team. The repair cafe opens to the public at 10am and closes at 1pm. Set up usually starts around 9am and finishes by 1.30pm. Manage the registration desk with at least one other volunteer. Ensure all customers are greeted and complete the registration form. Some may need help to do this, in which case you would sit down at one of our laptops and go through the form with them and ensure they know what they are agreeing to. Maintain the simple registration list at the desk which provides a summary of the items bought in and the unique card used to trace their item through the service. This supports us to be able to enter the repair data into a database to allow us to report the impact of our service to funders, repairers, customers and funders. Encourage customers to leave a koha/donation, if they can afford to do so. Ask customers to fill in a feedback form before they leave to ensure that we can learn how the service is meeting our customer’s needs and any suggestions for how it can be improved. Report to the NTCF Repair Cafe Coordinator if you require any support required, in a timely manner.