It felt like winter rather than the start of spring as a few hardy souls braved the rain to help out at one of our semi-regular tasks at Kingsgate Church’s student foodbank.

Sarah had a few things on the agenda for us and Emma, Emily and Jade were quickly away with cleaning fridges and storage areas on one of the church’s many levels.

Dave and Tom spent the session assembling a new set of shelves, completion of which they were definitely more impressed by than others, while Beth and Rachel organised and checked best-before dates of new products that had been donated.

Everyone chipped in for the final effort of lifting new trays of donations into position, including perhaps the largest collection of tinned peas in existence anywhere in the world!

On a pretty miserable evening, our presence was very much appreciated in what turned out to be a good fun task.

It was our pleasure to drop in on our group run this week to help the new student foodbank at Kingsgate Church, which is sadly needed to tackle student food poverty in Kingston.

A running and walking group made their way there to help volunteers Sarah and Alison tidy up and help with a stocktake, getting the shelves ready for more donations arriving this week. We discovered quite a few Goodgymers (Julie, Dave and Jade!) had experience of auditing and felt quite at home with a spreadsheet - bit of a change from our usual manual handling tasks!

It was great to welcome Luke to the group, who joined Claire, Jas, Jade, Rachel and Petra sorting out the shelves. Ellie and Emma armed themselves with cloths and cleaning products to wipe down the fridges and freezers.

Even though it has only been open a couple of months the weekly food pantry has been overwhelmingly popular, providing students with food, personal hygiene and cleaning items as well as access to optional pastoral support and signposting to additional services available.

We have said we’ll come back when they need some extra hands to do another blitz. Luckily not as cold this week as we ran back along the river to the Quaker Centre and did our cool-down!

4 Goodgymers got straight into the deep end on friday evening in this new year by delving into the deep freezers to give them a deep clean.

It was for a new student food bank set up to tackle hidden food poverty within the local area. Kingsgate Church are supporting local students and even though it has been open a couple of months it has been overwhelmingly popular showing that they can do great things to help tackle food poverty with young adults in education.

It sounds like Kingsgate Student Pantry are going to be busier than ever when the students come back to University next week.