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!