Another of our monthly visits to help out with the fabulous Liverpool Zero Waste Community. A repeat visit for Heetu and myself, but the first time for Ruth and Jennifer

This time the team there had been hosting a children's party in the early evening to celebrate the contribution of all the young people and kids that help out in the wider LZW community, often tagging along with family members helping to carry and sorts bags of donated food. They were finishing off cleaning up so we got started on setting up all the tables and chairs for the evenings donations.

As usual we mucked in, finding out what small changes had been made to the process since we last visited, and helping to get everything fairly distributed into each of the bags ready to be collected by people at the end of the night.

This time we saw huge amounts of punnets of Raspberry's and strawberry's and came home smelling of all these beautiful fruits and with a couple of bunches of saved flowers each too!

We'll be back again in a month so come and join us!

This was our forth visit to help out at Liverpool Zero Waste Community on their Friday evening session. They have an ever growing number of sessions every day across Liverpool and it's really worth checking out their social media pages to see all the amazing work they are doing!

This evening we had myself, Heetu and Mairead who have all done this session before, Jo and Ben, both seasoned GoodGymers but their first time with LZWC and brand new GoodGymer Jane

It was a quieter night than previous weeks with not as much surplus food arriving from shops around Liverpool. But we got stuck in cleaning up spilled soup, setting up chairs and tables, sorting through bags and crates of pastries, vegetables, frozen meals, fruit and cakes and sharing them out between the 30 bags all ready to be handed to people for family and community meals.

We're back here again in July so sign up and join us!

Another trip to join the amazing team of volunteers in the Friday night team for Liverpool Zero Waste Community.

Sallyann cycled her way to the venue and I walked so we arrived warmed up and ready for some table and chair shifting!

This session is normally very busy with nonstop crates and bags of food being dropped off ready to sort into bags for local families to come and collect. But this week was a little quieter than normal!

The spaces in-between drop offs (crates and bags of potatoes, bread, frozen ready meals, vegetables, fruit, pastries, cakes, sandwiches and flowers!) gave Sallyann and I time to catch up on her recent camping trip to the incredible Ilse of Skye and swap notes from my visit a few years back! While figuring out the differences between 'use by' and 'best before' we talked of beautiful scenery and magical skies, punctuated with a lifting a crate or two!

A swift clean up of tables and chairs to end and off Sallyann cycled while I managed to get a little lost choosing a scenic route to walk home, luckily google maps came to the rescue!

Even on a quieter night, 30 families and a couple of local community groups saved a lot of food from ending up in landfill this evening!

We'll be back again next month to help out, sign up here if you want to join us: https://www.goodgym.org/happenings/supporting-liverpool-zero-waste-community

This was the second of our monthly visits to help out with the amazing South Liverpool Zero Food Waste Community. It's a growing group of volunteers who are saving astonishing amounts of food from supermarkets and shops all over Liverpool, food that would otherwise be going to landfill yet is perfectly fine to eat still! They have venues all across South Liverpool and do about two pick up events a day for local people to come and collect a huge bag of food each. Large amounts of food are also distributed around various community organisations, plus fire stations and hospitals!
Their work is something to behold!

Our team of four included Abi who has recently moved to Liverpool having previously been part of our Newcastle GoodGym group, and Mairead a brand new member, both joining us for their first session in Liverpool, welcome both!

We joined the SLZFWC Friday night team, beautifully ran by Norma, and cleaned down tables, set up chairs and bags and got up to speed with the way things are done. Emma and I then took charge of the deliveries, marking off the various arrivals and carrying the bags and crates of food into the hall, and Abi and Mairead helped out sorting the food and distributing it into all the bags.

There was mountains of bread this evening coming in from every shop, loaves, buns, baguettes, and muffins, the entire room smelled of bread, along with trays and trays of onions, and of course lots of veg and frozen packets of food.

Then in the blink of an eye each bag was given to the lines of people patiently waiting outside. In total 30 families collected bags, and the rest was delivered to a few different community groups, meaning lots of hungry people fed and no food wasted!

Our evening of shifting and lifting was sandwiched in-between 3 of us walking to and from the venue and one cycling, so not a bad workout for a late Friday evening!!

We'll be back again in May, so do come and join us

Late Friday evening and four GoodGymers joined the fabulous team at South Liverpool Zero Waste Community's Elm Hall venue to help save food from going to landfill and redistribute it to 60 families!

Heetu arrived first and was instantly put to work by a busy team laying out chairs. Ema managed to get the wrong door and almost joined a belly dancing class by mistake but was relieved to be escorted around to the right place! With Eimear and John joining we were briefed by the fabulous Norma who leads the SLZWC team on a Friday evening, introduced to everyone and set our tasks for the evening.

SLZWC have a least two sessions a day, seven days a week, in venues across South Liverpool and manage to save an unthinkable about of food from going to landfill. As well as the huge amount of volunteers they have for each session in the different venues, they also have a fleet of people picking up all the food from supermarkets, bakeries and sandwich shops, and local shops, swiftly delivering it to the right venue ready to be sorted (by food type, and either best before dates which can be eaten at the receivers discretion, or use by dates which by law can only be used by midnight that evening!)

It's a system planned with huge attention to detail, with food safety and covid safety forefront.

We carried crates and bags, shifted tables and chairs, fetched boxes up and down stairs and helped out wherever we could, including Heetu and Eimear bagging items of food, John taking charge of the clip board and Ema giving out chocolates to the long queue of people waiting patiently in line ready to pick up their allocated bag of food.

It was an impressive sight that must take a huge amount of organising each week!

We will be back once a month to give the Friday night team a hand. You can sign up for the next session here