Let’s Lift The Curfew launched in 2023 to showcase women’s stories and concerns around getting active outdoors in the darker months when the clocks go back, as well as calling on wider society to acknowledge their role in making getting active outdoors safer for women.

On Monday evening, four GoodGymers met to run 5km, including Zelia for her first GoodGym experience! Now the clocks have changed it was very dark from the start of the run, and we took a route that went through some unlit areas. None of us would have taken that route by ourselves, so it was great to run together!

There's lots that all runners can do when running in the dark - wearing light colours, wearing high vis/reflective items and most importantly, having a light! Safer for you, safer for other runners and safer for traffic to see you too!

We hope to do some more group runs in Reading soon, watch this space!

What a fulfilling mission! Sprucing up an office to ensure it was a welcoming and professional environment for families needing educational and legal support was a worthwhile cause for a Saturday morning.

We sanded the walls, taped window sills and edges and proceeded to paint the entire office, with the help of Harry and Alex from the facilities team. The community centre will now do a deep clean and refurnish the room, continuing to provide a modern and warm environment for families and professionals going forward.

Going from white walls to very light grey make not look like a big change, but it certainly felt much fresher afterwards!

We went to New Beginnings on Saturday morning, while the breakfast service was on, to help with sorting the harvest donations received from local schools and businesses.

We got to work taking crates and bags out of the pantry, and restocking some of the existing stock to make more space for the new items.

In just under two hours, including a pause for a mug of tea, we managed to get everything put away, and most of the existing stock tidied up.

We're back again the last Saturday in November, and will probably be tackling the clothing cupboard!

Across Reading and Caversham, I posted GoodGym flyers on community noticeboards in shops, resturants and on the high street and also dropped into Reading Bike Hub to drop a stack of flyers, to see how they were getting on and chat about dates for future tasks. Watch this space!

We went to Whitley Growallot on a sunny Sunday afternoon to help them with some preparations for growing food for next year!

There is so much to be done on the allotment all year round to be able to grow food for the community, so today we were tasked with clearing one of the large triangular beds to give a head start for next year's planting.

There were some onions to be harvest, and garlic to be saved for replanting, but all the weeds needed to go!

After almost two hours of work, we were able to cover the bed with cardboard and tarp to hopefully make sure the weeds stay away over the winter, so the bed will be easier to plant into in the new year.

With lots to be done, we'll be back again soon, to help at this great community asset!

We headed out along the Oxford Road for this week's task of a litter pick. We welcomed Charlie back for her second task, and Freyja, already a GoodGym centurion, for her first task in Reading. It started off slow, with not much litter around, but then the bags started filling up. We were thanked by a few people for what we were doing, which was very kind.

Along the way we found the usual mix of rubbish of bottles, cans and packets, but we didnt egg-spect to find a number of egg boxes and an Uno card!

In the end we filled 7 bags of litter along our 3km walk. We took our group photo outside New Beginnings, where we'll be for our next task on 18th October.