Oxford Mutual Aid have been doing awesome work addressing food poverty in Oxford.

They provide free reheatable meals, emergency food parcels, and regular food deliveries, amongst other things. Although there may be points to make about the tragedy of this being necessary, we are very fortunate to have them here to support those in need in our city.

We made contact with Oxford Mutual Aid to offer our help only a couple of weeks ago and they have embraced our team with enthusiasm and appreciation. Having GoodGym help pack parcels and making regular food deliveries on their behalf enables them to get people off their waiting list and into the system receiving regular free food parcels. It also takes the pressure off their volunteer delivery drivers so they can focus on the larger parcels and addresses further afield.

We received our list of deliveries on Tuesday night, with an emergency addition on Wednesday, and divvied them up between our team. Most set off in pairs, with the exception of Team Microwave, who with food AND a microwave to deliver were allowed an extra pair on their delivery route. Whilst not quite what they may have been expecting to deliver tonight, their extra effort to get the microwave to the address means that person can now have hot food, whereas they previously had no cooking facilities.

A few of our GoodGym crew remained behind at Richard Benson Hall to make up further parcels and get the shelves restocked.

I hope you all enjoyed your walk and chat and that you got to know someone new tonight :-) I was very impressed by the snazzy masks you all wore!

Whilst it isn't our normal way to return to the same task week-in-week-out, this is a vital task and has never been more needed than it is now, so we are going to make this a regular Wednesday evening task. I'm certain we will be a highly-efficient food delivery machine! Options to help other projects will be available on other days, so there will still be plenty of variety to choose from.

A warm welcome to Alexandra and Rebecca who joined us for the first time tonight.

Oxford City Farm had welcomed Goodgym to their site a few times in 2019 so it was a delight to be back there this evening.

It was fantastic to see so many new faces at this session: Welcome to Elena, Lucy, Milly, and Sian.

After temperature checks on arrival, hand sanitizing and an introduction from Sally and Phil the team got to work. Our tasks were wide ranging today - trench digging, ramp dismantling, a thorough tidy of the outside shelter area, weeding and mulching the previously planted fruit trees and watering the contents of the poly-tunnels.

As usual the team were wonderful, getting stuck in with enthusiasm and an exciting array of tools - Aoife in particular has found a new vocation.

The transformation at the end was fantastic to see. Personally I love a task where the supervisors are sheep, chickens and a very beautiful cat. We hope to have many more tasks at this marvellous City Farm.