The Sherwood Community Centre played host to this week’s task in Nottingham. As usual, we were met by the lovely Louise on arrival and, once we’d all navigated the quirky airlock doors, we got to work on various tasks around the building.

Most of us started on clearing up leaves from the grounds using a cute little green trolley and the green plastic leaf picker-uppers which make you feel like a frog! Meanwhile, newcomers Jasmine and Stephanie popped off to do a very special job – measuring the dimensions of the ‘Sherwood Community Centre’ sign which stands on a grassy verge along the road. Once back, they joined Leah and Florence who were moving paint from a storage cupboard up to the art studio.

Towards the end of the hour, Matt, Aj and Nigel moved inside to help with more jobs, including attempting to open a mystery cabinet within a storage cupboard, while other first-timer, Sarah, finished up clearing the leaves outside with Rachel.

We’ll be back at the Sherwood Community Centre next Thursday (not our usual Wednesday). On Wednesday, we’ll be heading to The Place, so there is an opportunity to get TWO GoodGym tasks under your belt next week before the end of the month. Sign up here.

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!