GoodGym x Earth Hour - Lost in Donations

11 GoodGymers made their way 1.8km to help their local community in Southwark.

: Wednesday, 27th of March 2019
: Led by Lucy J

11 runners ran 2km last night to sort donations at the Salvation Army in Nunhead.

Southwark News

Community Missions abound this weekend! Help shovel woodchip at Surrey Docks farm to mark Earth Hour on Saturday at 10.30am. Find out more and sign up here.
Also on Saturday! GRACE is a charity that supports refugees and destitute families at home and abroad. They're having a 50p sale between 10am and 3pm on Saturday and they need our help! Pop in whenever you can - every little helps! Find out more and sign up here.
This week we celebrated the amazing Beth Hoskins who has completed a whopping 703 good deeds since she started doing good in January 2014. She's even received a special award from the Prime Minister for volunteering. She's off up north to Walthamstow and we're very sad to lose her.
Camden runner Abi Perrin wrote this brilliant article on why GoodGym is good for you - read it here.

That's enough of the business

Last night we headed to a brand new task! Old Spike is having more work done (they had some lovely new floors put in a few weeks ago) so we gathered next door at Batch where we were looked after by the wonderful Phil.

After a quick briefing we headed outside to do a bit of bouncy warming up and then run the 0.8km to the Salvation Army in Nunhead. It's an amazing building - a real rabbit warren! We're looking forward to getting a full tour next time - there's so much hidden space! We were met by Polis who explained that they're aiming to turn the Salvation Army into a busy community hub as more and more locals get pushed out by gentrification.

A huge hello and welcome to Vera, Rosanna and Alia who joined us for the first time!

Our task - to start tackling an enormous pile of donations. It all needs quality checking and sorting so it can be used in the charity shop or given to people who use the centre - from parents with young children to homeless people. You can see before and after in the photos.

20 bags of labelled sorted items went back into the stock room and 3 bags of recycling!

We started off by taking bags downstairs so we had plenty of space for sorting and Polis brought us tea, coffee and biscuits! Most of the donations were of excellent quality so we got to work splitting them into categories - womens top and bottoms, mens tops and bottoms, toys, outerwear (bedding, coats etc most needed by homeless people), books and miscellaneous.

Super amounts of sorting done, we waved goodbye to Polis and headed out onto Nunhead Green for a game!

Heads, shoulders, knees and cone

The basic idea - everyone in pairs in a line and squatting within touching distance of a cone. The 'caller' calls 'heads, shoulders, knees' etc until they say 'cone!' at which point the pair grabs for the cone. Whoever misses the cone then has to do a forfeit activity chosen by the caller - from burpees to starjumps to lunges! After several rounds we started whittling down to a tense final.