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We use Mid Cornwall Insurance Brokers ( Kirk Razzell) who provide us with Public Liability Insurance, product liability and employee liability. Tried loads of other companies.  Ansvar has been suggested for groups of RCs. Farnham uses Zurich but they no longer insure RCs. MCIB is remarkably helpful and insure lots of RCs. 

Hi Stuart,
if you want to email your phone number I can tell you what worked for us.  We started lat year and are very successful. repaircafeweymouth@gmail.com.

Regards

Ros

We use RepairMonitor to log our repairs retrospectively. It is very easy to use especially on an iPad. It needs refinement so if people keep giving feedback to RepairMonitor when they ask for it, it should get more sophisticated.
Regards Ros

Hi Stuart, I see you have had 0 replies to your query so I hope I can tell what works for us at Repair Cafe Weymouth.
Location + Repair Cafe. I was advised the other way round but apparently Repair Cafe org changed their standard because everyone did it as location + Repair Cafe.

Someone helped me to create our RepairCafeWeymouth facebook page. He created under his own personal account and made me an administrator. Once we had another person who could also manage the page, he removed himself as administrator. We created it as a page, not a group. This means anyone can like and follow us. They don't have to wait to be accepted into a group. We are a not for profit community organisation and created the page under this category. I could have done it myself once I saw how.

How we got and how we get volunteers and vet them: I suggested on a local Facebook page in January 2019 that a Repair might be a great idea for Weymouth. People replied saying it was a great idea, and even volunteering. I posted it on nextdoor.co.uk and got an even better response rate. I created an email address for our Repair Cafe. We called a public meeting a pub in Feb 2019, hoping to find someone to run it as well as volunteers. We got 40 people  - all either volunteers or press/ radio. We captured their contact details. At the meeting we publicly asked each person what skills they could contribute.  Our trial run, with all paperwork in place was 7 weeks later. We are very successful.

Now, people come to an event, they love it and they volunteer! I interview every volunteer face to face. We've had 2 who didn't work out - an electrical repairer who just declared everything fixed (without fixing it) or not fixable and wouldn't get things PAT tested. Also a rather doddery sewist who was a bit of a liability. We have 53 volunteers.

I hope this helps. If you would like to know more, see our facebook page and message me. Ros