It feels like a long time since we did a task at The Place in Sherwood…and it was. January 2025 to be precise! So, almost a whole year later, we returned last night for our latest Wednesday task.

On our last visits, we were helping paint the downstairs rooms as part of the renovation project to turn them into useable art spaces (more about this below). This time, attention was turned to one of the upstairs rooms. Our host, Rachel, runs Mind Alive, offering mindfulness, wellbeing and life support for young people and adults. She has plans to use the room at The Place for her forthcoming relaxing retreats and needed a hand with painting the walls to make it a more inviting and relaxing environment.

Winter 2025 seems to be the season of painting for GoodGym Nottingham, so we were straight in with the rollers and brushes to start covering the walls which had recently been plastered. Tom and Diana had just practiced their best Chuckle Brothers routine by transporting an incredibly long ladder up the staircase; however it was decided we needed more height so Matt kindly popped home to gather another ladder and his trusty extendable roller.

Despite a few issues with coverage, after an hour of painting the walls were already looking refreshed and more white. They will be needing at least another coat though, so we hope to return soon to continue where we left off.

Whilst Diana did a fine job tackling cleaning the paint equipment, the rest of us managed to get a sneaky peak at the rooms that we helped paint a year ago. It was incredible to see the transformation from what were two bare brick disused rooms, to two fantastic art spaces which are being used by local artists and groups. This felt exactly what GoodGym is all about!

A huge thank you to Rachel for hosting us last night and for furnishing us with tea, coffee, mince pies, cakes, bread and bananas! If anyone fancies joining one of Rachel’s wellbeing sessions, the poster can be found in the images and more information on her Facebook page.

Also, a big well done to Florence who just completed her 10th GoodGym task!! And welcome back to Diana who we have not seen for a while.

On the chilliest night of the season so far, nine GoodGymers returned to the Meadows Foodbank and Pantry for our Wednesday task. Mark always has lots of lovely jobs in store for us and this evening was no exception.

Jules, Marie and Rachel worked through a pile of recent donations in the clothing section, picking out anything that was warm and wintry to go on the clothes rails. Anything else was sorted and put away in the boxes and some items were bagged up for the charity shop.

Meanwhile, Leah and Nigel headed upstairs to the stock room, finding the nearest and furthest ‘best before’ dates on a range of food items. Tom and Hannah started making up some small bags of miniature toiletries that had been donated to the foodbank, whilst Matt and Khiltee sorted out some toiletries gift bags upstairs before heading down to help out on the shop floor.

We welcomed Marie to her first ever GoodGym task, we hope to see you again! We were also joined by Talia, a journalism student from Nottingham Trent university, who is writing a report on community initiatives as part of her final year assessment project. It was lovely to chat about GoodGym with Talia and we wish her the best of luck with her report (hopefully we will see her back as a GoodGym volunteer in future!).

Thank you to Mark for hosting this at the foodbank. It's always such a pleasure to do tasks there and we hope to return very soon.