Over the past 12 months myself and several other older men in the community have been very involved in getting the Cambridge Community MenzShed up and running. There was a MenzShed at Resthaven Retirement Village in Cambridge until approximately 5 years ago when it was closed down for various reasons.  

The current Cambridge Community MenzShed has started from scratch and to date we have signed up 40 Members and in recent times have been progressing through the necessary steps to establish the Shed here in Cambridge, which involved becoming an Incorporated Society and a Registered Charity, plus opening a Bank Account. We have held our inaugural AGM and elected the officers to run the organisation and have members who have established a Website and are working on other media profiles. 

There are over 100 MenzSheds throughout NZ and the aim of the Shed is to promote older men’s health and wellbeing. The concept of a MenzShed is to bring men together in one community space to share their skills in a workshop environment, which can be anything from woodworking, engineering, automotive or crafts. The aim is to have some fun, fellowship and do something worthwhile with your retirement, by working on practical tasks individually (personal projects) or as a group for the shed or the community. The sort of projects a shed tackles is entirely up to the shed concerned, however most sheds around New Zealand take on some community projects, examples of which include building playgrounds for pre-school centres, repairing toy library stock, repairing old bikes for distribution to poorer communities, small to medium furniture repairs for those in our community who can’t do that themselves, or building planter boxes for the main street of the local central business district, and the list goes on.  

The shed is a great place for members to learn new skills.  There might be builders teaching engineers some of their skills and vice versa, or Accountants/Lawyers/other professionals being shown a plethora of skills they never had the opportunity to learn in their working life.  Some sheds have women members or have sessions catering for women who wish to acquire new skills and get involved in personal or community projects. There are a wide range skills the members have which have been amassed over a lifetime, and a lot of them are keen to impart those skills to the younger generation through formal workshops teaching specific skill sets either on a one on one basis or as a class. We see this as particularly important as a lot of those practical skills are being lost with High Schools no longer putting an emphasis on woodworking and engineering.     

We have now secured a Community Lease on a Waipa District Council property on the corner of Lamb & Carlyle Street in Leamington which is an old Dairy Factory. The property is in a bad state of repair and needs work to bring it up to a habitable standard, which is our next major task. Once that is completed the building will make an excellent MenzShed being some 280-300m2 allowing us to create a workshop that the Community can be proud of.