I don't think we've ever had this many people attend a session! An amazing FOURTEEN of us descended on Mark at The Meadows Food Bank for an evening of lifting, sorting and cleaning. As usual, he'd come up with a nice big list of things for us to do, which we absolutely smashed (if I do say so myself).

Newcomers Heidi, Alex and Phil joined our old hands Hannah, Florence and Khiltee for the biggest job of the night – sorting piles and piles of clothing donations to find wintery clothes suitable to give out to the food bank's service users in the near future and get everything else ready to be passed on to charity shops to raise more funds.

Meanwhile, Peter, Matt, Aj and another newcomer, Neil, were on the lifting and shifting, moving bags out to Mark's car and bringing stock down from upstairs to top up the shelves.

Nigel and Leah were on sweeping and hoovering duty all across the stockroom and the community cafe. I'd never thought about it before, but Henry the Hoover is wonderfully GoodGym colour-coded.

Finally, Rachel and Dayna were on bagging up more of the mini soaps and body washes. We still haven't got to the bottom of them, despite Matt's best efforts.

We just about had time for a group photo (minus Matt, sorry!) before heading our separate ways. Welcome to all our new members, hope to see you at another task soon!

A Happy New Year from GoodGym Nottingham who met for their first task of the year yesterday. Unfortunately, our planned indoor task had been cancelled due to illness, but not to be deterred or put off by the chilly weather, we decided to meet for a spot of litter picking around the Carrington area of Nottingham.

We met at the Carrington Community Garden where we did several tasks in the summer. It was fully dark and not much above freezing, and it seemed impossible to believe that we were there at the same time, in daylight, and sweating buckets in shorts and vests just a few months ago!

After a quick sweep of the Community Garden itself, we split into two groups and headed off to see what we could find to fill our purple bags before the cold got the better of our fingers and toes. Peter, Tom and Nigel went in the direction of the Pirates Park and St John’s churchyard, whilst Leah, Florence, Khiltee, Matt and Rachel ventured towards the underpass and shops at Carrington. We managed to fill four bags of litter overall, including Matt’s best find of a military style hat complete with badge.

We could have definitely carried on picking had we not started to freeze a little and had we also not agreed to reconvene after 45 minutes to head to the pub (a little reward for our efforts). After a quick photo, we waved goodbye to Nigel and the rest of us popped into the local for a cheeky drink to welcome in 2026 and to debate the pros and cons (?) of having a birthday on 31st December – happy belated birthday to Matt!

The GoodGym Nottingham volunteers came together on 10th December for their annual festive social at Bustler, Sneinton Market.

With rounds of mulled wine, other alcoholic and non-alcoholoc beverages, and tasty food from Bustler's streetfood stalls, we marked another year-full of helping organisations and projects around Nottingham and various milestones achieved.

As always, conversation and debate flowed, with the key questions of the night:

"How is it that several group members had not seen Home Alone and is this really as shocking as some thought?"

"What is the best apple?"

"When is a berry not a berry?" (for the benefit of those not at the previous years Christmas social)

A big thank you to everyone who attended (and to Rose and Vytautas who made a brief surprise appearance before joining their rival party). We hope everyone has a lovely, relaxing break and we're looking forward to more good deeds in 2026 (we've already got loads of tasks booked in, check them out and sign up here.)