After a few days brake (following the group run earlier this week) we returned to Full Cycle today.

The storage area was desperately in need of a tidy up so we took things up a gear reorganising the space, shelves and various boxes of bike parts. It's amazing what a few hands can do in less than an hour!

Today we helped out the charity Voices of Hope by manning their stall in the Bentall Centre, Kingston. They wanted to raise awareness of their cycling challenge called Cycle of Change that was happening in Richmond Park the next day and of Brite Boxes - their scheme to help combat food instability for families. Both great campaigns! We manned the stall and had a go on their static bike. Lovely hour spent supporting a local charity.

It was our pleasure to drop in on our group run this week to help the new student foodbank at Kingsgate Church, which is sadly needed to tackle student food poverty in Kingston.

A running and walking group made their way there to help volunteers Sarah and Alison tidy up and help with a stocktake, getting the shelves ready for more donations arriving this week. We discovered quite a few Goodgymers (Julie, Dave and Jade!) had experience of auditing and felt quite at home with a spreadsheet - bit of a change from our usual manual handling tasks!

It was great to welcome Luke to the group, who joined Claire, Jas, Jade, Rachel and Petra sorting out the shelves. Ellie and Emma armed themselves with cloths and cleaning products to wipe down the fridges and freezers.

Even though it has only been open a couple of months the weekly food pantry has been overwhelmingly popular, providing students with food, personal hygiene and cleaning items as well as access to optional pastoral support and signposting to additional services available.

We have said we’ll come back when they need some extra hands to do another blitz. Luckily not as cold this week as we ran back along the river to the Quaker Centre and did our cool-down!

This week's DIY food bank drop off saw a bumper crop of tins and health care products donated to those who need it this winter. Dave and Jane both put out calls to their neighbours who kindly added lots more items to our donations so we had an even bigger haul this week! Check out the pictures from Emily, Marie-Noëlle, Rachel, Dave, Jane and Julie.

Don't forget to sign up for next Monday's task if you can!

Today's task took us to Fairfield Park where we joined Suzanne and her team of local residents to give the area a thoroughly good litter pick. There was a great sign up due to the January Challenge and we welcomed four new GoodGymers to their first community mission - hello Kathryn, Eleanor, Charlotte and Adam!

It was a great day for a walk, fresh but not too cold if we kept moving, and in our small groups we lapped the park inside and outside the boundary line - meeting for an impromptu chat when we met half way.

We found all sorts of weird and random bits of rubbish - half an umbrella, vapes, bottles stuffed into hedges and countless cigarette butts. Lots of small bits but it filled the rubbish bags we carried way too quickly.

We whiled the hour away chatting and playing with the litter pickers and soon it was time to pack up and go.

A great task - we'll head over for the next one so look out in the calendar for the next session.