Last night was a special GoodGym Portsmouth session – and a little different from our usual Wednesday evening!

After a run led by Jen, we headed to Aspex Gallery, where we were joined by volunteers from across Portsmouth – 25 of us in total!

The evening was part of Aspex’s COMMUNAL programme and Portsmouth 100, celebrating 100 years of Portsmouth as a city. Huge thanks to Aspex for bringing us together to imagine the next 100 years of volunteering.

We were welcomed by a brilliant photo wall of 50+ GoodGym Portsmouth photos celebrating connection, joy and community.

And a huge shoutout to Alex from GoodGym Central, who joined us from London. Alex was there when GoodGym launched in Portsmouth in 2018!

Using Appreciative Inquiry, we shared stories of volunteering at its best and explored what made those experiences special. Our themes included joy, purpose, friendship, community, environmental impact, inspiration – and embracing the weird!

Then we jumped forward to 2126, imagining the National Volunteering Awards. The acceptance speeches were hilarious, heartwarming and full of ideas about the future.

Perhaps in 100 years we won’t need litter picking because nobody drops litter anymore. ❤️

We finished by asking how we can share the story of volunteering – including asking “How do you help your community?” rather than “What do you do?”, and celebrating what’s in it for volunteers: friendship, connection, confidence, purpose and joy.

Because volunteering isn’t just about giving.

It’s about what we create together. ❤️

Huge thanks to Aspex, Portsmouth 100, Ideas Alliance, GoodGym Central and everyone who came along.

Here’s to the next 100 years! 🌱

Wow, what a turn out! It was great to see so many GoodGymers out tonight - thank you everyone for coming.

We welcomed Dani from GoodGym Lewisham for a spot of GG Tourism whilst he is house-sitting locally, and met Lucifer for his first ever session - head to their profiles to give them a cheer!

Tom had plenty of tasks for us tonight, the main job being spreading woodchip over the children's play area and around the pond. With lots of lifting and shifting, and plenty of raking, many hands made light work of the task.

Meanwhile, the rest of the team got to work weeding and pruning on the side path of the orchard. We temporarily lost David to a large bush where he was extracting a bramble. Sinéad's trimming of the rosemary bush left a pleasant aroma for the rest of the evening. The discovery of Fred the Frog led to a lot of distraction, and even a photoshoot, courtesy of Jane.

We enjoyed and evening of education, with history lessons with Jim, spanish with Dani and nature studies with Sinead. Other conversation topics includes Sandi Toksvig, Mastermind and David the Gnome.

We ended the session with picking apples and grapes, ready for our lunchboxes for the rest of the week.

It was fab to welcome back Tracey for our task this evening, after a break away from GoodGym. We made our way to St Faith's, and got straight to work with litter picking, lopping and sweeping.

Tracey and The Katies took on litter picking, Our team and managed to put together the best part of a full outfit with their finds - pants, trousers, a sock and a glove, as well as coat hanger to display them all!

Team Dave were in lopping duty, tidying up the brambles and budlia round the front of the church. Dave spent as much time in the bag of cuttings as he did out of it.

Jim helped David from the church with clearing the side path. They made such a difference I didn't recognise the place when I walked back through at the end of the task.

There was quite a lot of Double Trouble tonight, especially when the we included the church volunteers too! Two Katies, two Jens and in impressive three Davids. We very much enjoyed some tea, squash and biscuits before heading back to FCC. And we also learned plenty about looking after snakes 🐍 - fortunately we didn't come across any in the church yard.

There were only a small number of us for the task this evening, and Barbara had set one of our biggest challenges yet - clear a path from the gardens to the tap!

It looked pretty daunting to start with, but after we got the strimmers up and running, and David got to grips with a new scraping tool, we were on a roll! The eclipse let us down a bit in its spectacular-ness, but we were able to see to power through to the end. Swings and roundabouts, I guess!