Weed-pulling: Knot as easy as it looks

Background to today’s activity

Computacenter's Sales Enablement Team were today joining GoodGym for a team day out in the heart of South East London with London charity, Thames Reach.

Thames Reach is a London charity that offers projects and services helping to support vulnerable individuals and those affected by homelessness.

The support they offer ranges from providing outreach services to accommodation and day centres.

Today Tommy, Elvis, Eunice and Joel welcomed the Computacenter team and GoodGymers Joel and Laura at three Thames Reach locations, to lend a hand in the garden, helping to clear large areas of weeds, cut back hedges and tidy pathways.

Writes Joel,

“13 amazing volunteers from Computacenter's Sales Enablement Team put in a Herculean effort to transform the gardens at Thames Reach this afternoon, supporting this homeless charity.

A strong walk over to the edge of Burgess Park saw a high energy team warm up for the mammoth task ahead: helping the Thames Reach team in Bagshot Street get their gardens back on track, so service users can utilise and enjoy the green space.

A fast start saw the team clearing out the overgrown flower beds, trimming the overhanging bushes - and getting a serious workout on the manual lawnmower!

Filling up black bags at a ferocious rate, we soon had the garden going in exactly the right direction.

Then came the weeding and (labour-intensive) pathway-tidying and brushing down...

A full-on workout was achieved in this 90 minutes of action, and the garden transformed into a really inviting space for service users to engage with.

A massive impact!

Great to have you all along!”

Writes Laura,

“The already-good-sized team gathered in Paterson Park grew steadily this Tuesday lunchtime until we were a fabulous-sized team of 32, heading out to our three different locations.

Team lead Diana took one team across to Thames Reach Bagshot Street location to meet GoodGym's Joel, along with task owners Elvis and Eunice, while Clare, Yvette and I headed over to the Roseberry Street and Galleywall Road Thames Reach locations, where team members wasted no time grabbing gloves and garden tools and getting straight down to work.

This was ninety fast-paced minutes of hedge-cutting, weeding, path-trimming – and bagging. Not to mention a good bit of strategising (compost pile vs bin bags; hedge height preferences; strimming priorities…You name it).

Yes, on what was a warm (not complaining – at one point thunder was on the menu, so a spot of humidity came as a welcome surprise) September afternoon, this proved quite the workout.

The gardens’ before and after pictures are quite something, and our task owners for the day Joel, Eunice and Elvis and Tommy seemed pleased at the results."

The shout-outs

• Thanks to Southwark Area Activator, Sam, for coordinating the tasks, and putting us in touch with Thames Reach.

• And a very big shout-out to the whole Computacenter team, for a fantastic, meaningful, fun afternoon, especially to our team leads. (...And to Brad for today’s fun pun!)