Despite waking to snow on the ground and a yellow weather warning for snow in place in Newcastle today, three hardy Northerners ventured into the Walker area of the city to deliver leaflets for Food Cycle. Food Cycle is one of our regular task owners. They take donated food from supermarkets at the end of the day and turn it into a hot three course meal, available to anyone who needs it. We’re always happy to help them spread the word.

Special kudos to Aimee who rushed out in her lunch hour, leaving behind her “big coat”, gloves and hat! Michael and I were in awe!

250 leaflets delivered in less than an hour. N-ice! And we’re doing it all again in the Felling area of Gateshead next week. Sign up here and fingers crossed for warmer weather! leaflet delivery for Food Cycle in Felling

We've lent a hand to FoodCycle in Newcastle twice in the last three days and that feels GOOD! Tonight was the great scatter leaflet drop for FoodCycle Westgate following on from the Community Mission on Saturday for FoodCycle Monkchester, which you can catch up on here

Pop over to give Andrew a massive cheer for organising all the FoodCycle tasks and for storing the leaflets for us.. hopefully we have created some space in your flat by getting this job done tonight! FoodCycle are super happy with the work we've done spreading the word. It was great to see Sam along for her first ever group run tonight too. Welcome!

We had lots of weekend news to catch up on including Lucy smashing her first ever parkrun; Louise, Dan and Abi taking part in the Gateshead Trail 10K and some great racing at the inaugural Try on the Tyne event on Saturday where Miranda, Katy and Ross did their first ever official 10K- how amazing is that? We also started making plans for the GoodGym 10th birthday celebrations, and shared details of the GoodGym Newcastle photo and picnic which you can sign up for in the party listing here.

It was a letter-making warm up although out of context, the warm up photos are probably more fun. It's always a super start to the night getting a bunch of grown-up (?) people playing a childrens' game. Miranda led a walking group, Paul led the runners and I hung out somewhere between everyone while we dodged a heavy downpour. Everyone had between 30-50 leaflets each and got straight off, scattering down the streets paralell to Brighton Grove near Nunsmoor Park where we have done regular tasks. We managed to cover loads of the streets in Andrew's plan (see the map in the photo!) and had a few fun moments including Ross finding a discarded plastic leg and Louise ending up delivering to the very house she lived at in 1986! What are the chances of that?!

We made it back to Nunsmoor for the fitness session in a little over half an hour. We changed location twice, once due to flooding and next due to a couple "doing a Jack and Rose" from Titanic in the car park (Thanks for that, Katy!) Tonight's fitness session was a new one adapted from an old PE game which we called THE REACTOR in which we had to use our reactions at the same time as physical prowess to avoid a quad-burning forfeit. There were some superb competitive sides on show but we all made friends again before we left. The most important bit was of course getting some good Instagram content.

It's a double Community Mission weekender- let's hope the sun shines! Sign up for a spot of Gardening at St Lawrence Park on Saturday or Help at Harbottle on Sunday.

We are also going to be helping out at the Star and Shadow during their big build clear up and clear out on the 22nd August. Find out about that and sign up here -they'd love to have you along.

It's back to Elliott House next Monday for the Group Run where Rachael has promised us she will conquer the hill- so make sure you sign up to be part of this legendary run moment. See you then!

Anji x

The rain held off this morning for a sunny session of leaflet delivering. Today, we were delivering leaflets for FoodCycle Monkchester that are offering the community a free meal in Byker every week!

At the meeting point our eye was drawn by a poster outside Harbottle park advertising their volunteering sessions with a picture of Miranda, Paul and Aimee from a previous mission! See the picture above - everyone in Byker has!

Liz achieved her 46th good deed today! We will be seeing her in her black shirt very soon!

We delivered a few hundred leaflets in half an hour and called it a day. We met a few people a long the way who already knew about FoodCycle and even a lady who had delivered the same leaflets we had!

Three more good deed added to the GoodGym Newcastle total which puts us on 1903 in total. 1903 was the year Orville Wright flew an aircraft in the first documented, successful, controlled, powered, heavier-than-air flight. But, more importantly, we're about to hit 2000!

Big Love

The rain may have subsided but it was still a chilly night out there on Westgate road, so a huge thanks to everyone who came along tonight!

It ended up being a super productive night of leaflet delivering! I estimate that we might just have delivered over 1000 leaflets, which is an amazing effort! If you, like I, prefer to count your leaflets in inches - we started with around 8 inches of leaflets and managed to deliver a whole 4.7 inch stack of leaflets, leaving only just over three inches remaining (another day perhaps?)

Doing our best group run impression we tried our hardest to stay together up the monster that is Westgate road before coming to a stop at the Baptist Church, where the FoodCycle kitchen is. We stopped for a photo in front of the church where we had our photos taken by a generous passerby who went to extreme lengths to get the shot just right!

The task owner from FoodCycle had asked us to keep track of where we had been, so we split into team and each team received their own uniquely coloured highlighter which they used to fill in where they had been on the map. It was a busy night with many people out on the streets - we ended up giving a lot of leaflets to people asking what we were up to. I gave many leaflets to a group of boys who wanted to take home an extra leaflet for their parents so they could convince them to go to FoodCycle with them!

We made our way back to the hotel winding through the streets while delivering more leaflets. Dan was there to congratulate us at our return to the Hotel but unfortunately that wasn't enough to earn him a good deed!

Huge thanks again to everyone for coming and battling the cold and the hills just to be nice people!

It was a new community mission for us today on a very foggy Sunday morning. The weather didn’t put off six excellent GoodGymers from showing up and busting some grease!

The kitchen definitely wasn’t the worst we’ve ever seen but there was still some TLC needed. The biggest improvement we made today was the fryer – see the pics for the before and after. Louise shifted a serious amount of grease out of that fryer!

Charlotte and Liz paired up to tackle the oven while Katy and Ross tag teamed washing up and hot water distributing. I celebrated my 50th good deed today by Marie Kondo-ing the utensil drawers – everything needs a home. We wrapped up with a quick break for tea, which Liz kindly made for us, before all grabbing a mop and making the floor sparkle!

Thank you to everyone for coming, you make the world a better place! The next community mission is on Tuesday where Katy will be leading a library tidy, sign up here!