Many hands really do make light work! Goodgymmers showed up this afternoon at Holy Trinity Church to help Living Well Bromley sort and pack up Christmas bag donations to be distributed to those in the community next week.

The task was organised like a well oiled machine, in fact so well organised that the initial task of packing 150 bags worth of groceries from storage was completed in no time, so the team then set out to check pre packed bags that had been donated, ensuring that each bag fulfilled the checklist and if not, ensuring they did.

A few in the team gave themselves the challenge of trying to memorise the checklist, however it was soon established they probably shouldn't trust their memories to complete the task.

The final result was a total of 300 bags ready to be distributed next week. Not bad for an hour and a half!

Ria, Nick and Ian lent a hand to the volunteers who run the Living Well foodbank, sorting the many bags and boxes of harvest donations into the different food types. Surprising how heavy one of those big plastic tubs gets when you fill it up with dry pasta, let alone four of them!

A lovely day for a short run to Living well charity shop! Sorting so many lonely books looking for the new home! Some of which found their way to my home!

A great community task on a frosty day for Cat, Hannah, Amanda (2nd Bromley GoodGym outing - please cheer!), Gemma and Anna (both 1st timers with GoodGym - please cheer even more!).

We all set to work with the other Living Well volunteers, checking through a list of items to make sure every Christmas bag from the food bank would have all the right goodies, from tea bags to tinned veg to toilet roll. We also had to remove some items to set aside for later so that they wouldn’t be attacked by cheeky mice in the meantime! All the packages will go to families and residents of the local area who need it. I think we reached a total of 160 full bags in the end, with a few more to be added soon. Great work!

My first visit to Living Well food bank in Penge this afternoon and it was great!

A team of well rehearsed and dedicated people greeted me. I was advised on how to help and where different food products could be sorted into.

One very quick hour later, I had to shoot off.

Will definitely be back if they’ll have me!

Hannah, Nykolette and Ian rolled up to the Living Well Foodbank for another session helping this fabulous - and currently quite stretched, more below - team. Our mission for the day was to help the team with one of those periodic jobs, sorting out the "miscellaneous" cupboard, cleaning it and then putting everything back properly. We found some winners medals (well done Nykolette!), a few things went in the bin along the way, but we also stacked eggboxes for maximum space efficiency and also carefully decanted veggie oil and shampoo from mega-5-litre bottles into small jam jars. Why? Because when the Living Well give out single-person allocations, they use egg-boxes to take 2 eggs, and the jam jars for single-person quantities of cooking oil and shampoo.
As I said, the Living Well are quite stretched at the moment as the need for their services is rocketing. This means they are having to buy food in quite large quantities (for example £600 worth of tinned meat last week), to supplement the many donations that come from the local community.
You can help too, if you want to, by donating at https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/cost-of-living. All donations (up to £250) are currently being matched by the National Emergencies Trust Local Action Fund, so go on, every £10 becomes £20. Please give them a hand and try and get their fundraising up from £20,000 (which they've hit) to £30,000.