On the chilliest night of the season so far, nine GoodGymers returned to the Meadows Foodbank and Pantry for our Wednesday task. Mark always has lots of lovely jobs in store for us and this evening was no exception.

Jules, Marie and Rachel worked through a pile of recent donations in the clothing section, picking out anything that was warm and wintry to go on the clothes rails. Anything else was sorted and put away in the boxes and some items were bagged up for the charity shop.

Meanwhile, Leah and Nigel headed upstairs to the stock room, finding the nearest and furthest ‘best before’ dates on a range of food items. Tom and Hannah started making up some small bags of miniature toiletries that had been donated to the foodbank, whilst Matt and Khiltee sorted out some toiletries gift bags upstairs before heading down to help out on the shop floor.

We welcomed Marie to her first ever GoodGym task, we hope to see you again! We were also joined by Talia, a journalism student from Nottingham Trent university, who is writing a report on community initiatives as part of her final year assessment project. It was lovely to chat about GoodGym with Talia and we wish her the best of luck with her report (hopefully we will see her back as a GoodGym volunteer in future!).

Thank you to Mark for hosting this at the foodbank. It's always such a pleasure to do tasks there and we hope to return very soon.

Full commitment from six GoodGymers as we tackled painting the kitchen at Sherwood Community Centre. With shoes off (Matt and Peter) and overalls on (Nigel and Pete) we rolled up our sleeves and got stuck in
Somehow we kept out of each others way and managed to get a coat on all the way round the kitchen. We also welcomed Lisa for her first ever GoodGym task, hopefully the first of many!

We returned to Sherwood Community Centre last night for our latest task. Under skies filled with pretty fireworks, loud bangs and other sounds (more on that later), we met Louise on arrival who set us to work on various exciting jobs around the centre.

Leah, Florence and Tom started off by moving books and radiators around the maze of the building. The books included a diverse range of titles (as shown in the photos), although most were about steam trains and the wars. Once they had finished this job, they moved onto dusting and painting the hallway area, and Tom had the honour of hanging the welcome sign in the foyer.

Also inside the building, Matt turned his hand to a spot of painting while Nigel celebrated his 50th good deed with the important task of painting over the ‘Barbie’ pink wall in the kitchen.

Meanwhile, outside, Peter, Khiltee and I tackled the leaves in the grounds, sweeping, raking and bagging as much as we could in the hour. As well as being treated to a soundtrack of booms from the fireworks, we also noticed that we could hear two very distinct hoots of owls coming from the trees above. As we stopped to listen, along with some of the centre-users who were leaving after their exercise class, we caught a glimpse of one of the owls swoop from one tree to the next. What a privilege!

Thank you to Louise from the Sherwood Community Centre for hosting us and, as always, giving us lots of fun tasks to do. We will be returning next week for more (sign up here).

Now, to the milestones. Congratulations to Nigel on his 50th good deed, Peter on his 60th and Leah on her 80th. Oh, and it was my 150th! 😛