It may be my age but it doesn’t feel like five months since we last did a donation drive for our friends at East End Women at Building Futures East. Time flies I suppose! We met tonight at the Cycle Hub at the Quayside for a social walk combined with a donation collection for the foodbank. As we aren’t back at our Stepney Bank Stables base until next week it felt like great timing.

We have been helping the Foodbank for over four years now, with early tasks being during Covid, sessions which ran through all of the lockdowns and provided structure for us and support for the project. In fact, for some of us during that time it was the only place we ever went and had any human contact outside of our homes. We’ve also helped to pack Christmas food parcels, deliver leaflets, paint their project spaces and even helped to decorate a bus.

There was no such hands-on-ness for us tonight as instead we just met for a social walk and catch up. There had originally been four signed up for the session but it ended up being just me and Anna with some Mondayish circumstances getting in the way! We had a lovely walk up to the swing bridge, under the Tyne bridge and back over the millennium bridge (thats a lot of bridges) and chatted about all things work, marriage and life related- it sounds heavy when it’s written like that but it wasn’t! We made it back to the hub just in time for the rain to start again.

Post-Easter can be a challenging time for families and donations can be lower so I’ll keep the donation bag in my car for the next week or so, so you can bring donations along to the next few sessions and I’ll take them along when we have a few more.

There are three chances to do good stuff with us this weekend, including this big Urban Green Community mission on Saturday which looks like it’s going to be massive. Our Monday session moves to Tuesday next week as we join forces with the brilliant Ouseburn Trust. We’d love to see you at that as we take advantage of the light spring nights.

Have a great week!

We had an absolutely brilliant day as we held a bake sale at Stepney Banks Stables in Ouseburn.

We raised a massive total of £101.50 for East End Women Foodbank (who we have previously helped out) Based in Walker, they do amazing work helping out those in need including families and children with donations of food, emergency parcels and toiletries.

The teamwork was brilliant, everyone got slightly emotional and there were hugs as people were so generous. Thank you to everyone who donated either money, foodbank items or cakes to sell.

Special thank you and kudos
• Tanya, Debbie, Krishti, Michael, Liz and Lucy for your help • Sara and Stepney Bank Stables for all your fantastic support •Anji for your kind donation, fantastic support and reassurance/always being available (especially when I had a last minute panic this morning!) •Sebastian for your amazing baking and kind donation •10th Newcastle Guides for your generous donations of items for the foodbank

It was lovely to be back supporting the fabulous East End Women charity today, specifically the Stitch Sisters project. Stitch Sisters provides women in Newcastle with professional sewing skills to help them into employment in the local textile industry. They have a fantastic huge space in a building by the River Tyne which we’ve helped paint previously. Today we were back to help paint the reception and toilet area.

Project lead Rebecca was already there and organised with paint, rollers, brushes, dust sheets and tunes playing when Paul and I arrived. We were soon joined by first timer Jenny. Jenny passed the GoodGym Newcastle initiation challenge of actually finding the East End Women site! Well done Jenny - it’s great to have you on board!

Paul and I started by adding a second coat of paint to the walls that had already been painted. Jenny started with a first coat on the awkward wall with lots of doors, safety signs and various attachments to paint around - she was an expert with the roller extension pole! Meanwhile Rebecca got cracking with a rather dazzling shade of green in the toilet!

We made good progress - the reception area was finished and the toilet was sew green - we even had time for a quick donut break! Sew positive to spend a Sunday afternoon supporting Stitch Sisters. I’m sure we’ll be back by the river again soon!

It was another busy day at East End Women’s foodbank today with a mixture of tasks - packing bags of food, helping load them into the volunteer delivery drivers’ cars, re-stacking shelves and getting rid of all the cardboard - and no, the recycling container still hasn’t been emptied! Today was the last time GoodGym will be helping out here - at least as a regular weekly task - so I thought I should find out why there’s a double decker bus parked outside. Sadly, that remains a mystery! GoodGym Newcastle has been helping out regularly at the foodbank since May 2020 and I was there the first week, so from a personal point of view it felt fitting that I was there in the last week too. It’s been amazing to see how it has developed over this time and it was good to hear from Sarah today about the plans for the project to evolve, with new ways of helping the people in the East of Newcastle. One of the photos is a reminder of the work they’ve done so far and it’s been an honour to have contributed. Although we won’t be continuing on a regular weekly basis, I’m sure this isn’t the end of the relationship between GoodGym Newcastle and East End Women. Sarah has lots of ideas about tasks we can do in the coming months. In the meantime, for both of us, it’s bus-yness as usual!

It was my last visit to East End Women foodbank where we have helped out for the past 14 months every week (often twice!)

It was a great task today, filling a trolley with food then bagging up food packages, ready for delivery tomorrow. In under an hour myself and Fiona, a regular volunteer at the foodbank, had prepared over 50 packages. It felt like a busy hour and it was great to see the parcels all ready to go.

Even better was a double ice pop to keep it cool!

After the hottest day of the year so far yesterday it was a little cloudy today when Tanya and I met for our second task in less than twenty four hours. Nevertheless there was plenty of work to keep us warm at the foodbank today. There had been a slight shortage of volunteers earlier in the week so we had a variety of tasks to get stuck into. We started with quickly packing thirty bags of cupboard food to keep up while fellow volunteer Chan organised the bags and loaded them into the volunteer delivery drivers’ cars. Next up we made a start on the huge pile of cardboard, flattening it and loading it into the shipping container outside. No - it still hasn’t been emptied and yes - it’s pretty full now! Our last task was tidying and re-stocking the shelves. We were short of tomatoes but well supplied with meatballs!