The Basingstoke Disability Forum (https://www.bddf.org.uk/) do some incredible work around Basingstoke and provde amazing resources for the community.

Today they hosted their annual Disability Awareness Day in the Malls where 26 service providers set up stalls and told local residents about what they do in the community, I had a great time going around and chatting to everybody and as always was amazed by the amount of great groups in the area.

As for what we did, I attended the setup and helped the providers get organised and set up while Tazmin, Charli & Pajinder joined myself to help pack up at the end of the day. Taking down a lot of signs and carrying plenty of tables to where a van was to pick them up.

After a few months of hard work and great numbers we decided to do a social sessions this week!

As usual we met at the Basingstoke Sports & Social Club who have incredibly generously allowed us to use the their committee room for free all year. Then we went for a walk out and around the War Memorial Park before scurrying back once it started raining.

Once we were back at BSSC we went into the committee room and set up for our games night. Yeun & Tazmin both brought some board games to play and we decided to try some altered team games. We started with Articulate where to make it harder we combined it with charades, the highlight was definitely Yazid trying to make us guess "stream" which took at least 5 minutes.

We followed this with Scattergories where we decided to all work together to get the most possible words. I would like to formally admit that Charli was right and that a dormouse weighs significantly less than a pound.

Throughout all of this there were great conversations, snacks and a lot of laughs!

Thank you all for a great evening

Another great session done! We like spending time down at Eastrop park as it is such a beautiful space!

This week we went from Basingstoke Sports and Social Club to Eastrop Park where we met Sandra from the council. After a bit of stress where we couldn't find all the tools we have previously used we got together everything we could and split into two teams.

Charli, new member Nathan and myself went and did some litter picking and while Eastrop Park is always tidy we were able to find a good collection of rubbish.

Meanwhile Sammi, Evelyn, Tazmin, Yazid & Yeun made the best they could with the available tools and did a lot of clearing of weeds and dirt tidying up beside the boathouse!

We were also joined by Pajinder who saw us volunteering and joined us along with having his daughter providing morale support! Was so nice meeting him after he moved to Basingstoke yesterday! Look forward to seeing you at future sessions.

We were able to make a really nice difference in the space

No heatwave stops us, we were out in full force yesterday after a last minute change had us painting and gardening at the Viables Community centre.

It was a great session with the main job being to revitalise a lot of planters, scrapping the paint off and giving it a fresh lick. They turned out looking amazing and some wonderful before and afters!

Samantha & Kelly (t her first session did an exceptional job weeding the gardens around the area managing to fill a who bag with weeds before composting it.

Sammi and Peter also did a greta job litter picking where the highlight was finding a rats skull which was graciously donated to Charli who loved and left it.

With 6 of us meeting at the Basingstoke Sports and Social Club Evelyn &Tazmin walked to Viables while none of Sammi, Yeun or Peter were willing to let the others down so we jogged over.

Wow! I'm blown away by how much can be achieved in just over an hour! Led by Charlotte and Suzi from the Dwelling place we cleared so much of the garden space preparing it for the next step in its transformation.

This meant cutting down and removing a trees and bushes, completely clearing a tonne of ivy, moving all the rocks and pavement slabs and creating a giant pile of cleared out garden waste.

I'm incredibly proud of the team for how much effort they put in and how much we achieved and also thankful to the Dwelling Place for how welcoming they were.

For this session we met as usual at the Basingstoke Sports & Social Club before we split into 2 groups with Sammi, Yazid jogging and Tazmin, Yeun & Evelyn walked to the Dwelling place where Charli & Samantha met us.

With the YMCA Basingstoke having to cancel our session with them we quickly changed to doing some litter picking instead.

It was a beautiful evening and was quite fun getting back to our roots of litter picking. Eastrop Park was as always pretty tidy, but we found if we went a bit off the path there was still plenty of litter to be collected.

It was lovely having Guy join for their first session and Yeun at their second sesison.

In the end we filled 3 bags of litter and left the space looking much nicer! As always we had a fun time chatting as we went