De Circulaire Concept Store

Inclusive meeting place in Leuven about circular economy

MAAKbar is the place in Leuven where people come together to learn new skills that fit into a sustainable and circular lifestyle. It is a low-threshold meeting place where everybody can repair their broken stuff or lend materials in the tool library. There is also a plant shelter, a greetings card shelter and a nail library. We regularly organise repair cafés and offer a wide range of zero-waste workshops. In this way, we want to inspire everyone to reduce the amount of waste and contribute to a sustainable city.

MAAKbar wants to make circular economy an inclusive and participative story. We will actively motivate citizens to write our story together. Citizens are at the wheel and fill in the agenda themselves.

Due to the great success of our initial concept, we moved to a new address in Diestsestraat, where we wanted to start a new chapter. Unfortunately, this relaunch fell through in the middle of the corona crisis, which meant that several planned activities could not or only barely take place. The aspect of meeting and getting together, MAAKbar's strength, was forced to be scrapped to a large extent. This also had consequences for MAAKbar's income.

Nevertheless, we started a large sewing project of mouth masks from re-usable fabrics. We mobilised about 600 volunteers and worked closely together with different city services. The project did not bring us any financial profits, but it did lay a solid foundation for the future: more people got to know us, the cooperation with the city services was very positive, and we were repeatedly mentioned in the press.