Change (the garden) Grow (some vegetables) Life (enjoy it)

That’s what eight GoodGymers did this week, at Change Grow Life in Richmond House. We removed bind weeds and brambles to shape the ground of what will become a green oasis for gardening activities and growing vegetables.

Change Grow Live (CGL) offers support services to help people make positive changes in their lives, including help with substance misuse, mental health, and social challenges. They also have a gardening project where they are creating a new garden space, potentially aimed at providing therapeutic or social support through gardening as a tool to help people make positive changes in their lives. This could involve creating new garden spaces, growing vegetables, offering gardening activities as part of their support programs, or collaborating with other organizations to promote gardening for wellbeing.

With this social mission GoodGym Brighton also helped CGL to get ready for the memorial service that they hold annually on National Remembrance Day, which is the last Friday in July, to honour those who have lost their lives to drug and alcohol addiction. In 2025, this falls on July 25th. The garden might not be fully ready by then, but it shows some flourishing plants that were hidden by the brambles until now.

This was a very satisfying social mission!

On a gently sunny evening, a veritable bevy of Brighton GoodGymers (including a warm welcome to new recruit Mauricio) turned their attention to a regular venue on the GoodGym roster, The Bevy, a community pub/hub, familiar to some as the go-to breakfast venue after the formidably hilly Bevendean Down parkrun. The journey for many involved a 3.5km trot up Lewes Road (allegedly the longest named road in Brighton & Hove), to complete gardening and clearance tasks.

One cohort of the GoodGym team were assigned to the Bevy's allotment, tending to a variety of fruit trees and vegetable patches, weeding and planting the likes of kale, beans and rhubarb. Meanwhile the other contingent tackled a backyard area, hacking away unruly bushes and brambles, and ridding the area of fallen leaves, mounds of soil, buckets of stagnant water and abandoned paraphernalia. As well as finding a rusty electrical device reminiscent of a ghost trap from Ghostbusters, there was under an old beer keg the discovery of a slow worm, the UK's only legless lizard, and apparently a relatively frequent visitor to the Bevy's undergrowth.

Following the transformation of the allotment and backyard, Dave, Shirley and Warren from the Bevy committee were impressed, with one commenting that the outcome of the group's work was "like Christmas", a nod perhaps to GoodGym's predominantly red and white wardrobe. The group was rewarded with an array of tasty snacks from the Bevy kitchen, including cheese scones and Eccles cakes.

The Bevy, for now over a decade, is proudly the only community owned pub on an estate in the UK, keen to support its local neighbourhood amidst cost-of-living challenges. A busy calendar of events for June includes a music and memory cafe for those with dementia, a disability disco, seniors lunch clubs, family days with creative activities for children, and a summer beach party to close the month.

The GoodGym team is happy to support such a cherished community venue, and as the sun set on another completed mission a small Taskforce group duly took the opportunity to visit the Bevy bar, order a glass of the usual, and sketch out its own summer party plans.

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