Great Croft is an award winning hub that provides a wide range of activities and workshops and also functions as a specialist centre caring for older people with complex needs. The hub also provides a hot lunch and a range of outings and special events. Over the last few years, Great Croft have landscaped the gardens immediately next to the centre for use by their community, with GoodGym Camden helping with some of the heavier-duty work.

To help carry on this work, this afternoon 10 GoodGymmers met up to help look after Age UK's Great Croft gardens (some of them sporting shiny, new(-ish) black t-shirts... 🤩)

There were a variety of jobs on offer, and we naturally split into our favoured roles. We litterpicked, weeded, swept, cut up sticks, and took down bunting (whatever whimsy took us). It sounded as though everyone was having fun as were worked, with the buzz of a nattering chatter filling the air (my personal favourite conversational topic was about yoghurt, but maybe that's just because it's cultured 😉).

With over an hour of work accomplished, we had some mini-tarts and flashed some t-shirts at a camera for the requisite picture before saying goodbye.

There should be another community mission to help Great Croft again in a couple of weeks. Keep an eye out for the listing (along with other Camden community missions) here.

Today, three Camden GoodGymmers met up to help Age UK with some weeding and a general tidy up of Greatcroft Centre gardens.

The Gods were capricious today, sending tube strikes, missed train connections and a stopped watch in an effort to derail us from helping out. When that barely worked (we all arrived within about 5-10 minutes of the start time, despite setbacks), the wind took over playing with us mere mortals.

Thankfully, CJ and I were weeding, which was relatively unaffected by the wind (we mostly worried about whether something would fly off someone's balcony). Forking the ground over, we talked about the rich tapestry of language and most definitely did not talk about anything too rude 😅

In contrast, Ben's job was infinitely more affected by the wind and had slightly less colourful language: he was litterpicking around the garden. Despite looking personally victimised by the massive amount of foil streamers laying around, he survived with relatively little trauma (the way all GoodGym tasks should end 😎) and is presumably happy to do it again.

After 90 minutes or so of work, we made plans with our contact, Jade, to return in a couple of weeks to continue helping and sauntered off to our respective Saturday plans. Keep an eye out for future listings of you'd like to join us! 😄

28 Goodgymers ran 3-5km to help the American International Church and Age UK Camden

Welcome along to newbies Beth, Rachel, Asher, Stephen, Amanda and Ian - thanks for coming along. We also had tourists from Stockport and Lewisham - amazing!

In the news this week:

1. There will be a GoodGym Social next Thursday, sign up here.
2. The GoodGym Olympics is going to be on Saturday 3rd August this year at Parliament Hill Track. Sign up here and represent Camden.

What a good night! We had two wonderful tasks help older people and the homeless in our community. Both tasks involved beds!

Age UK Camden:

15 of us headed around 1km away to help Age UK Camden, a fantastic charity. Our biggest challenge on the way there was crossing Euston Road, I have no idea where all those people are going!!

Upon our arrival Abul tasked us with emptying five planters of soil and dismantling the wooden containers which kept the soil in. It was a great task, our only issue was the lack of tools. We used forks, spades, plastic containers and even our hands to collect soil to pile up on one side of the garden.

Let's Get Physical

Working on three of the planters at once we got tons done over the 45 minutes we were there, taking apart and piling up lots of old wood but also emptying the planters we worked on. Talk about physical!

After finishing up we headed for an extended run home taking in Coram Fields and Russell Square.

American International Church by Pritesh:

13 of us headed off to the American International Church for our weekly trip to make beds for their homeless shelter. Kat was leading and we weaved our way through the streets to get to the church as fast as we could.

Once there we had a stirring speech from one of the organisers explaining the impact our 15 minutes of volunteering really makes – the stories really brought to life the hardships of those that have to use the shelter but also how much good can come from giving up our time and effort to help. With not much time, as ever, we worked quickly to get duvets covered, pillows stuffed in cases and hospital corners fixed on all the sheets!

Impact

With everything done we posed for a group photo and then Kat led us for a high intensity fitness session in Russell Square before we headed back to base, stretched and some headed for a well deserved drink.

Sign up for next week here, we'll be helping Alara and the homeless shelter.

PB out