After last week's pram raid, Steph, Kash and Sevan found a free-to-take pushchair on the way to Care4Calais. It was in good condition, so they decided to donate it to someone in need. The only question was who would play mummy or daddy? Steph volunteered and tested out the handling on the way to C4C's West London base where it was gratefully received.

At the task, the trio found that Anita was a late sign up and had found her way to the secret location. Welcome to GoodGym, Anita! 👏🥳🎉 We look forward to seeing you at another session soon.

"It was interesting and rewarding to do something really useful to those like they helped my father a lot when he came to the uk" - Anita

Today's jobs for Tamzin were dependent on the levels of clothing stock, so Steph and Kash started creating womens' small packs, then large, then extra large. No medium? No stock! Care4Calais would love some donations of good quality medium sized clothes if you have any to spare.

Anita meanwhile was sorting clothes with Tamzin and deciding which ones were good enough quality to keep. Big holes and unidentified stains were some of the reasons that donations were redirected to fabric recycling. Once complete, they moved on to preparing requests for male clients.

With building the standard womens' clothing packs completed, it was time to use them. New clothing requests were brought in and Sevan joined the team in adding shoes, handbags and coats for the winter to customise the packs. Kash even managed to pull together enough clothes for a couple of clients who needed medium sizes.

By the end of the task, there was a stack of requests ready to be delivered to needy people. We'll be back helping Care4Calais again next month, so look out for the session listings soon.

Today's visit to Care4Calais included an unusual new task for the team to complete. A haul of prams, pushchairs and wheelchairs were unloaded from task owner Tamzin's car and they needed to be cleaned. Had they been (p)ram raided from a local shop? Not at all, they'd been recovered from a local recycling centre where they'd been sitting outside for a while. Kash offered to put on waterproofs, wash everything down and find out which ones still had more life in them.

Steph worked alongside Tamzin to prepare clothing packs for local hotels, tailoring them to the needs of each recipient. Some of the previously created packs had to be fixed too to correct the sizes of the clothes. Outside, Kash was also preparing a custom request, finding a wheelchair for an 11 year old who couldn't walk.

In another area, Afshin and Sevan worked on a third task, sorting new donations. Care4Calais are always in need of clothes, particularly for men, so there was a little disappointment from Tamzin to discover that there was mostly womens' clothing in the donated bags. Helpfully, some winter coats and hats were found too, which will be really useful in the coming months.

To wrap up the task, Steph moved the completed clothing packs to be collected by the delivery driver and the newly sorted clothes went to the storage room, replacing those that had been used. Apart from the slightly soggy wheeled transport outside and a lot of stock rotation, there was no evidence that GoodGym had been present, just in case the police do come knocking 👮.

With the return to school looming, there are parents across the land cheering (including Rebecca) and children lamenting the end of the summer holidays. Back to school means new school clothes and that's no different for Care4Calais' clients, some of whom will be going to UK schools for the first time.

Packing school clothes and shoes was the priority for the GoodGym team today. With building work ongoing at our usual location, the stock needed was spread across different places and the stock room wasn't as well organised as it usually is.

First up was to find school shoes for the new students. With the smallest ones starting at nursery, there were some tiny feet to protect and everyone was working at at different scale to the usual Care4Calais sessions. With some sizes unavailable, they did the best they could, hoping that larger pairs would quickly be grown into.

Then, there was a change of location to Care4Calais' offsite storage to find clothes for the children. Boxes were helpfully labelled "10-11 years, grey" or "4-5 years, grey", which was great as most schools expected grey clothing and each GoodGymer was working on packs for a particular age group. Peering into the boxes, the sizes and colours were all jumbled together and not as ordered as they claimed, leading to a lot of rummaging and calling to others when unexpected sizes or colours were found.

Even with the extra challenges and the mid-session road trip, the team managed to complete all of the requests and clothe all the children, even if a few will have a slightly baggy style for a term or two.

Another session with Care4Calais, but Steph Ducat was the only regular to assist Tamzin. Today we welcomed Sylvia for her 1st Goodgym session. Both Ariane and Maxime are not newbies, but also their 1st session with Care4Calais. Today was not our usual task with preparing clothes with different items and sizes. Tamzin and her husband are having works done in the house, which also includes the different rooms where loads of items are stored and packed once prepared. Our mission was to move all the items from the main storage on the 1st floor to the 2nd floor in order for the contractors to be able to work in those.In one hour with some lifting, moving boxes, bags etc the team with Tamzin and her husband cleared the room. Tamzin was overwelmed and didnt think we would have completed that task so quickly. We all stopped for some water as very hot and dusty due to the works being done in the house. As we still had 1 hour left, Tamzin said lets go to the ware house in Ealing to prepare bags/parcels for the 4pm collection. This was also a first as short road trip!!No singing in the car. Once arrived we started to unload the car and get parcels ready with adding shioes to the ready made bags, but we encounted a small problem. We were missing bags to add the shoes, so Steph Ducat ran to local shops to find bags Tamzin needed...not easy task as they didnt have what we wanted .....so after 3 stores found what we needed. Back at the ware house and the crew cracked on and all the shoes were added, labels added and boxed/bagged by destination ready for thwe 4pm collection. Shoe-t for the stars!

Care4Calais had a big job for GoodGym this afternoon. To prepare around 130 packs of clothing for refugees in one hotel. Some of the residents had been given clothes previously and today, the second big delivery would complete the task.

Boxes of clothes were piled up waiting for the team, who welcomed back Mohamed for his first GoodGym Ealing task since moving back west 👋. The ask was fairly straight forward, to make standard clothing packs in a single size at a time, on a larger scale than normal. Everything was set up like a production line to make the system quick and easy:

1. Open a bag 🛍️
2. Place socks inside 🧦
3. Hand on to the next person 🤜🤛
4. Add men's underwear 🩲
5. Add a hoodie 🧥
6. Hand on to the next person 🤜🤛
7. Add jogging bottoms 👖
8. Add 2 t-shirts 👕👕
9. Done ✅

With much of the clothing being black or navy, the team needed ways to make sure the right clothes ended up in the right bags.

"Are these hoodies or joggers?" - GoodGymer
"Which half naked man is on the pack?"
"The hoodies have topless men on them too, which doesn't make sense" - Tamzin, task owner

The "naked man process" worked up until the team realised that some packs had 2 hoodies and no trousers in them. Cue a rapid search through 40ish packs to identify which ones needed fixing.

Despite the hoodie issues early on, an improved system meant that the job of creating the packs finished early, with a range of small, medium, large and XL bags tightly packed into boxes.

After the rapid and fairly repetitive production line, came the slow, creative piece. Fitting all of those boxes into 2 family cars needed thought, inventiveness and some force. With both cars full to bursting and ready to be delivered to Care4Calais' beneficiaries, it was time to wrap up and wander home in the late afternoon sun.

Today's visit to Care4Calais provided a lot of variety, with plenty of different jobs to work through. There was variety in the location too, almost, as the GoodGymers were supposed to meet at a storage unit, then a last minute change had them unexpectedly climbing back up the hill to the Care4Calais HQ.

Once in the right place, Kash and Sevan started outside (in the shade, thankfully), on a fold out table adding socks to boxes and boxes full of pre-made clothing packs. They came out of the car, were socked up, then went straight back in. Getting them back in involved a complicated game of Tetris for one person. 😅

Moving to the cool of indoors, there were a handful of new requests to fulfil, with many of them needing shoes. Shoes are constantly moving around Care4Calais' on-site storage, so task owner Tamzin often needs to explain the new system. This time, boxes were perched on top of other boxes in a corner and there were a lot of used running shoes. Kash was on the hunt for some size 11s and could only find some New Balance with all sizing labels rubbed clean. Hopefully they're the right size for the recipient. 🤞

Next was a quick session of making extra large men's standard clothing packs, then onto sorting and sizing an big pile of men's donations. The same pile that had been left to one side last week as they focused on women's stock. Today, Sevan became the sizing model, as everyone tried to work out whether unlabelled clothes were small, medium or large.

Time flew by and Tamzin was happy to have all of the jobs on her list crossed off. For the GoodGymers that was rewarding too and it was great to spend 2 hours at an indoor task, away from the heat of the afternoon sun! 👌🌞