A nice, festive session last night! We were helping out Beckenham Park Care Home with some decorating.

First up, some of us met at the Bridge House (and shared our fave xmas tunes), a few people met at Shortlands Station and a few made their own way to the task.

It was a pretty long run for most of us (4.5k!) but a good way to warm up on a freezing cold night.

When we arrived, we were assigned to different parts of the care home to add festive flourishes:

🎄 Decorating a tree

🌿 Adding fake greenery to the stairs

🍽 Spicing up the dinner tables

🎀 Putting up beads and ribbons around photo frames and on the dog (see pic)

It was good to do an inside task in that weather although I'm not sure most of us expected somewhere so fancy...!

We smashed through it all in half an hour and went our separate ways.

Nice one team! 💪

On Tuesday, we visited Croydon Refugee Day Centre to help them sort donations and label clothes.

Our inherited member, Emma currently immersing herself in all things Croydon, popped by on her way to Bell Ringing, as she has not been able to join us due to events clashing. She had gone around and removed all the empty clothes hangers from the clothing rails that had been emptied by the visitors earlier in the day. Sadly we had to say goodbye to Emma but it was very good seeing her and hearing about how she was getting on at bell ringing school.

We welcomed back Zoe who had not been out with us for a while, it was good to have her back at another event, we told her about the treats and our break time with Simon, but sadly he wasn't because he wasn't feeling well so there was no treats. Instead we had Ivanka whom we had not seen for a long time so although there was no treats we were blessed with Ivanka's company.

Ivanka, wanted us to go through the clothes rails check that the clothes had labels and where they had missing labels, we were supposed to label them and place them in the correct spots based on sizes.

We got stuck in chattering away as we checked and label clothes with missing labels, before long it was time for us to move the clothes back into the store room and said our good byes.

It was a dark, autumnal Tuesday evening, but this didn't scare the team away, with 11 wonderful people joining to complete the autumnal clean of the boulevard this evening. Unfortunately, Conroy was unwell, so Liz lead the way.

A warm welcome to Tomi, who joined the team today and welcome back to Bassey and Kemo for their second session!!

Also, a shout-out for Magda, who completed her 200th good deed today! AMAZING!!

The team promptly set-off to collect the tools, to allow as much time for the task as possible. The team collected litter, swept leaves and cut over-grown brambles.

The team worked hard and filled a grand total of 38 bags of waste!!

Well done team!!

Last night we ran, 2.2km to assist Croydon Refugee Day Centre.

We welcomed Louise back to another session, we must be doing somthing good in Croydon to entice her so far south, either way it was great having her along.

When we areived Simon was there to greet us, he explained he had a listnof task that was left for us to complete.

• First we searched for all the empty hangers on the clothes rails, this gave an idication of how many items of clothing had been given out during the day. There were many empty hangers we didnt count them as we were trying to see how much of the list we could complete.

• Next up we went through bags of sorted clothes to seperate clothes for 2 years and below. We were about to finish this task when Simon returned reminding us of our our KitKat break. We were back to the normal KitKats this week, I'll make sure next year Halloween, we are back they for the special KatKat.

• Then we were tasked with the big one, going through the boxes of clothes 3 years and above, to remove all the summer clothes. Yes this is a massive task which will have us sorting for a while with future tasks. With an eye on the clock we managed a to sort a few boxes before stopping to put away the racks of clothes into the room.

Louise reminded us about Goodgym London monthly drinks happening on Thursday, fancy meeting like minded folks and expanding your Goodgym friends network Click here for more info.

Its November so its not too soon to say it Xmas party/meal come and join us as we celebrate our achievements of the past 12 months.

Hope to see you at the next group run to create more memories.