Today we were involved in an international women’s day event that merged women led local community groups with an upcycling event focused on ladies clothing!

This idea was the brain child of Tirza from Slough Anti Litter group supported by Riffat and Clarissa from The Slough Bid; Rosa from Together As One (and GoodGym); Sbba from Asian Star Radio and Knit your socks off; Samina from Sakoon through Cancer and Knit your socks off; Bep from Thrive365; Claire from I Got Style and of course us!

Each group had a host of volunteers supporting the event from set up to swap shop to manning stalls to panel interviews to decant! Well done to all the team members. Great unity!

Need some hanger management?

So we started the day by helping to hang up already donated items. Sut was already on it by the time I arrived. So I hanged around letting her get on with it.

We soon had a few rails already to go and dressed to impress! Just needed customers now.

Has that cardi-gone?

So what is a swap shop? It’s an up recycling event whereby you can select up to 10 items to donate, pay a donation fee, bring in your clothes to the swap assistants (us), and collect tokens for the value of your items which can then be used against other donated items!

We had a tight slot of 30 minutes to receive the swap items, code them to a value (we had a Strava vs parkrun coding system going on so as to not offend anyone if we thought the value was lower (parkrun … sorry parkrun we love you really), or higher value items aka Strava! We then dished out the tokens for the customers to use against other clothes.

Dior to Dior sales

Although the event was a pre book event we didn’t want passerby’s to have FOMO so we had Agni out in the mall handing out flyers letting people know that they could come in too!

Purse-Shoe your Dreams

Whilst the swap assistants were busy sorting and hanging, there were workshops and panels interviews going on where some really insightful and heart warming stories were being shared… I loved that Anita loves red (we have a tshirt just waiting for her), Samina loves trainers (we know where you can use those!) and Claire’s advise on wearing a different colour each day next week might just be my challenge (I’m sure I have race t-shirts in every colour of the rainbow).

Even The Mayor Amjad Abassi and local MP Tan Dhesi came along to support the event.

Really positive feedback from the customers with loads being ‘bought’ during the swap shop opening time.

Thank you to the team for getting involved.

Huge congratulations to Jean on achieving her 100th Good Deed today on a community litter pick in Wexham.

Our Jean

Jean loves coming along to community missions and as many Monday evening as she can do. Do you remember when she looked absolutely radiating at the Get Active Awards? Jean's an inspiration to us all with her enthusiasm to get the task done. She has so many stories to tell and we love hearing them. She truly is a flower of strength.

We briefly 'lost' Jean's 100 balloon! But there was no way Jean was going to let it go... she chased it down the street until eventually collecting it from a driveway!

Street cleaning for street performers

The task today was to do a street clean up of litter in preparation of the Home Slough Follow Me event taking place today. We met with Hannah from Home Slough who told us which areas to focus on (which was effectively the route the street performers would be following).

By the end of the hour we had collected 9 bags plus 4 mops!

A quick call to Slough Council's waste team to do a collection as we actually collected a lot more rubbish than we thought we would!

Thank you to Helen, Jean and Hannah for a job well done

Tonight’s task was an exciting upcycling task!! A fellow do-gooder Tirza from Slough Anti Litter Group has been hard at work not only getting teams around Slough litter picking but also getting the town to think about recycling, costs and renewing and fixing old items.

One of her initiatives is to upcycle old clothes.

So we took this opportunity to meet with her at The Centre (thank you Everyone Active for the loan of the indoor space) to upcycle some of our running clothes.

We met at Salt hill park and after the usual task brief and warm up we headed the 1km (or maybe a tad more!) to the Farnham Rd.

Never tell a woman she can’t purse-shoe her dreams

We were glad tonight task wasn’t a Dior to Dior leaflet drop or an outdoor task where our jumpers would of got blown away - that would’ve been a cardi-gone! Being indoors on nights like these are just pure bliss!

Drum roll please

Ricky turned up.. yes you read that correctly, Ricky turned up! Was great to see him… he said wanted to get to 100 before Meera hahah!

So our upcycle was to label our T Shirts with our current good deeds numbers (or nearest number!)

Sutyee is 363 whilst I am 636! What a play on numbers

Sandy was going for gold with 184 and Ricky was forward thinking of 100!

Gauri was an even 50 whilst Meera was hitting Route 66

Jean was 91! Though she didn’t like that number

Thank you Abdulaziz for being our photographer

Great efforts all round!

Next week we will be meeting at Upton Court park for a 5k run (or shorter distance of 2km also available!) plus a litter pick.