Myself, Poppy, Louise and Paul arrived at the foodbank to get sorting, along with Leon and the usual foodbank volunteers. It was Paul's first shift at the foodbank after a few weeks of volunteering with GoodGym, so we started off by explaining the process to him. We then got to weighing, sorting and dating all the food we had received. As usual, we had loads of donations from local organisations, as well as two trolleys and lots of bags of public donations this week, which was great to see (including enough Crisp Rice cereal to feed an army!)

Although there was a lot to sort through, we finished the job with ten minutes to spare... plenty of time for a celebration chocolate and even some free bagels to take home!

4 GoodGymers combined with a mix of other volunteers tonight to help sort donations for Birmingham Central Foodbank.

Louise, Poppy and Holly got started with the weighing and sorting of donated items along with some of the other volunteers, whilst myself and a few others undertook a bit of a stock take and moved boxes of donations to different areas depending on their use by dates.

There was quite a few volunteers present tonight, including some who were new, and this was great to see (and we still had good space to work in).

There was also some promotional filming tonight to highlight the work of the food bank and hopefully entice more volunteers. Louise and Poppy very kindly got involved with an interview for this, as did a few others, and we were all filmed in the background undertaking the various roles.

I went and took some some photos of the GoodGymers in action / posing for the report. Louise was showing great maths skills when I interrupted her and made her have to count over - sorry Louise; whilst Poppy and Holly were hard at working dating the donated goods.

Overall, the session went by quickly and we managed to get through a lot, which enabled us to sub-sort donations into 6 month brackets and do some more stock replenishment. As the saying goes, many hands make light work and it was great to see everyone.

So, myself, Poppy, Holly & Louise met for the usual Monday evening shift at Birmingham Foodbank. It was Holly's first goodgym task and she wasted no time getting 'stuck in' with the other guys with the sorting as I did the weighing of the food before joining them with the sorting and dating of the donations. With the other volunteers from the foodbank, we seemed to make light work of the donations and showed another great example of how 'many hands make light work'! As busy as we were, we had a quick 5 minutes for a glass of squash and a 'Jammy Wheel' and that was us done!