It was a hot and humid late-notice task at FareShare South West meets the North Bristol Foodbank - loads of food to load into crates and onto 14 pallets onto a big lorry on the other side of a busy road - full-on sauna workout.

Two more potential future task beneficiaries who now know who to call when there's lifting and shifting to be carried out (to a big lorry) ;-)

This was the last community mission for FareShare’s winter FoodStock campaign. We did at least 8 shifts (that I can remember!) of parcel packing and pallet shifting over the past three months, packing hundreds of meals for families in the South West. Although we were a small group this time with three runners, we each packed 20 parcels totalling 60 families helped between the three of us. Welcome to new GGer Arthur!

Despite the forecast of summer heat on a Tuesday in March, four GoodGym runners chose to spent their afternoon helping out at the warehouse of Fareshare. Our mission was to mixed build mixed pellets of various donated food items. For Sarah, this was already a familiar task (and one of her favourites!) while Helen and Emily attended GoodGym for the first time. After sharing some top tips how to build a solid base out of packs of tinned tomatoes and cans of Irish soup, the two quickly improved their stacking stills and ended up with incredible neatly packed pallets. The students had clearly surpassed their master in a single parcel packing session (so proud!). Meanwhile Irena build her pallets located at the far end of the warehouse meaning that she had to walk the furthest distance to get items for her stack. She made up for it with some incredible strength and skill in carrying multiple multipacks of canned items (some of which were quite awkward to carry!).

To complete our work, we had to wrap up our parcel in cling film going around the pallets in circles until all items were secured and snuggly attached to the pallet beneath. This was sadly one of our last sessions at Fareshare but I'm sure the charity has more in store for us at their main hub so keep an eye for more tasks at Fareshare.

Great job everyone!

We put on some steel toe overshoes and got to work. We helped to lift and shift 20 pallets of donated food - each pallet had one type of item on (baked beans, tinned meat, tinned fish, soup, spaghetti hoops, 10kg boxes of pasta, pasta sauce, curry paste, teabags etc) and our job was to put a specified number of cases of those particular items onto empty pallets in order to build up a pallet with mixed food items. The mixed pallets are then distrubuted within FareShare and other charities.

Welcome to Daniel who attended a GoodGym Community Mission for the first time (but has volunteered at FareShare before is was a pro!)

I started to write some lyrics to the tune of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air but I didn't have time to finish it. Here is what I have so far:

Now this is a story all about how, Six volunteers travelled across town , And I’d like to take a minute, Just sit right there, I’ll tell you how we became the GoodGymmers of FareShare

In a big warehouse on Winterstoke Road, We put on our masks and spent half of our day, Lifting, shifting and following rules, Helping a charity that distributes food, We’re just a few guys that like to do good, In our lovely Bristol, our neighbourhood , The Covid rules were strict but we didn’t get scared, Because we are the GoodGymmers of FareShare

Thanks for the great work everyone!

Weightlifting challenge accepted!

Turn 20 single item pallets into 20 multi-item pallets - go!

Beans, tinned tomatoes, tuna, couscous, sauces - you name it, we Tetris-stacked it.

All so we can unpack one of the pallets tomorrow at St Luke’s Lunch Club!

It’s a workout and a half at FareShare’s Foodstock campaign - 20 pallets of single (ish) items to be turned into 20 equal pallets of mixed items, in a safe and stable Tetris game with squatting and weight-lifting.

We aced it, winning all three prizes for the best stacked pallets and have ideas for the next GoodGym olympics...