Compliance

To protect yourself, protect the safety of your crew and visitors, and comply with the law, there are a number of steps you need to take. This page describes some of the issues SEE Change repair cafés have encountered and how we have dealt with them.

What follows is not legal advice and should not be relied on for legal purposes. We strongly recommend you consult with a lawyer to find out what is right for you and what your obligations are.

Managing risk

In most jurisdictions, including the ACT, the person in charge of a “business or undertaking” has legal obligations about managing risk. This also applies to community groups. Consult a lawyer to understand exactly what you have to do for your repair café.

Regardless of legal obligations, you should consider:

  • risk assessment: identifying the risks in your repair café environment

  • risk mitigation: policies and procedures to reduce or eliminate risks

  • risk management: how to reduce the danger of risks that cannot be completely eliminated

Do not assume you can eliminate all risks. Everything in life has a certain amount of risk involved, and repair cafés are no exception. Assess risks by their likelihood of happening and the impact if they did, and try to reduce both as much as possible.

Document the risks you have identified and what you have done about them, and keep that document regularly updated. Encourage everyone to keep an eye out for risks and report them. Risks are most dangerous when people think they are ‘mistakes’ and try to conceal them.

SEE Change repair cafés have found that risks tend to fall into five groups:

  1. Volunteer safety

  2. Attendee safety

  3. Damage to the venue

  4. Damage to repair café equipment

  5. Damage to personal property

About personal property damage

Repair cafés normally specify that repairs are attempted at the item’s owner’s risk and that the repair café accepts no liability for any damage that might result from the attempted repair. Make sure you get legal advice about how this works in your jurisdiction, and that every attendee agrees to this before anyone attempts a repair on their items.

Insurance

One way of managing risks is with insurance. Insurance requirements may be set by the law, by your venue, by your auspicing organisation, by the nature of the repairs you are doing, or all of the above.

Don’t just treat their requirements as a checklist, though—make sure you have insurance coverage that is aligned to your risk assessments and risk management strategy.

The most common forms of insurance for SEE Change repair cafés are:

  • Public liability insurance, which covers you if someone claims your negligence harmed them or their possessions

  • Insurance against injuries suffered by volunteers and visitors

  • Insurance against damage to the equipment you use in the repair café

Legal structure

Repair cafés which adhere to the principles of the international Repair Café movement are generally not-for-profit. In Australia this means they will be regulated by the Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission (ACNC).

The ACNC provides information on legal structures for charities, outlining multiple options.

Some repair cafés exist as unincorporated associations: the repair café is not a separate legal entity from its members. Your repair café will probably be an unincorporated association, by default, for at least part of the setup stage.

However, unincorporated associations have significant limitations and expose their members to legal liability for the association’s debts, so it is likely you will want to incorporate a separate legal entity for the repair café at some point.

You can also organise under the umbrella of a parent organisation, like SEE Change. This gives you the protections of being part of an incorporated organisation without having to manage one yourself.

Make sure you consult a lawyer to determine which legal structure is right for you.

Records of decisions

Many of the things you have to record will involve money, and we discuss this further on our page about money management. But it is a good idea to make a record of other decisions as well. Keep minutes of your organising meetings. When a task is assigned, keep track of who it was assigned, what they will do, and when they need to report back. When you agree on a policy, record the decision and why you made it.

At some point in the future you will need to look back and find out what you decided about something or why you decided the way you did. Keeping good records from the start will ensure you can do that.

How SEE Change can help

Repair cafés that operate as SEE Change groups can access legal and financial advice, governance frameworks, and insurance designed to insure you stay compliant with the law. Get in touch with us if you’d like to discuss working with SEE Change.