Tuesday 30th May 2017
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Report written by Katie Welford
48 bloody excellent humans ran to THREE tasks in Lambeth to help sort a playground on a community estate, to jazz up Brixton Windmill and to help the bees!
Well. So much happened I don't even know where to start. Not happy with having 47 runners last week, tonight we went one better, with 48 glorious souls joining in our weekly group run. This is EXCELLENT. It means we can do some serious good all over Lambeth and tonight we did three tasks.
BUT FIRST! The winners of the May Shit Prize of the Month (SPOTM) were: George, who wrote a fantastic blog about how GoodGym is helping her deal with depression and Rose who has totally smashed good deeds this month with a total of 9! She only got involved in GoodGym a few months ago and has got started with a coach and is generally awesome. Rose is the proud winner of a prize donated by Sylvie - to be her massage dummy during her qualification. OUCH!
Task 1 was a new run to Brixton Windmill - run report by Tom Benson So I was delighted when Katie told me I was going to the windmill. The many years of GoodGym Lambeth adventures has never taken me there and what a treat it was. After I took team windmill on a bit a detour, we were warmly greeted by Jean, Niv and Steve to tell us what we had in store. The aim of the game was removing one fence and taking it over to a herb garden and reinstalling it to help protect the area, whilst at the same time tidying up both patches by removing weeds and woodchips and giving the herb garden a nice layer of top soil to boot. So in GoodGym style we whacked on our gloves and got cooking. After 30-mins it was operation complete, Jean and co were delighted and we definitely represented the phrase 'many hands make light work' expertly. On the way back I decided to take team windmill on another little detour but all in all a cracking night, nice one Windmillers.
Task 2 was a return to Ameena at Holland Park Estate - run report by Katie Welford A short run and a lovely small but determined group. Our mission was to unravel bind weed from the bushes around the park. You weren't allowed to pull it but instead get right down to the root and yank it out from there. This was tougher than it sounded and some hardy runners literally got in bushes and unravelled yards of the pesky weed. Rich and a team of fearless litter pickers really got the place looking tidy and Andrea got to work giving the whole place a good old water. Stellar work gang!
Task 3 saw a return to Kennington Park and the lovely Bee project - run report by George Bright We were LIED TO and DUG A GRAVE.
NB This information has yet to be corroborated by official third party sources. Other tasks included planting trees and sorting out the bee garden. Nice!
All in all, a lot of running and a lot of good!
Holland Town Gardening Club looks after some of the green spaces on Holland Town Estate, a council estate near Oval. In particular GoodGym has helped residents to improve and maintain one of the main playgrounds on the Estate. It used to be a no-go area full of weeds, broken glass and dog mess. With the help of Good Gym it is now an oasis of wildlife-friendly flowers and fruit bushes and is now used by families. GoodGym has helped out by doing some of the heavy work of digging and removing pernicious weeds, as well as the general maintenance tasks of weeding and watering and regular litter picking. They also help with one-off jobs like removing ivy that was growing into a resident's windows, joining residents to plant spring bulbs around the Estate, and digging over and sowing flower seeds in a disabled resident's garden.
See moreWed 31st May 2017 at 12:47pm
task 3 - as long as everyone returned from the task..... :-)
Lambeth
Providing food distributions to those in need