Follow the Leader

On a warm but windy day (yes Sally wore the right outfit tonight whereas my outer jacket and scarf were totally unnecessary so a quick wardrobe change was required)…we headed outside to Salt Hill Park for our warm up. I tasked the team to run around the flowerbeds. They ended up forming a strange running line with Darren at the front being chased by the female GG runners (imagine a scene out of Benny Hill and you’ll know what I mean!) Warm up done with some follow up tag based games, we headed out our relatively short distance today into Slough Town. Jenny, who is still recovering from an injury was on walk duty today and had a head start on us. Thank you to Darren for back marking this evening.

The worthiest of Projects

Tonight it was our absolute pleasure to help The Slough Outreach – Homeless Project. I’ve been following the amazing work that the team do over the past few months and was hoping to get an opportunity to support them on one of our Group Runs. The Project headed up by Shin works tirelessly 7 days a week to help the homeless, vulnerable and displaced people of Slough and the surrounding area. With a view to END HOMELESSNESS. Slough Outreach work with various local charitable organisations who support them. Monday’s is the turn of Nishkam SWAT, who are a Sikh based organisation that devote their time, efforts and energy into doing Seva (serving the community), not only in Slough but UK wide

The Forgotten Community

The SWAT team do an amazing job in supporting our local community with donations of food from locals businesses, blue chip organisations to the average person.

Their service has grown to covering 19 locations, 26 times a week

Our task this evening was to help serve on the drinks stations. We had a good turnout tonight as our Goodgym runners have one clear alignment with Nishkam SWAT and Slough Outreach – We want to help our community.

Did you know?

• There are 320, 000 homeless people in the UK
• 36 new people become homless everyday due to issues like spiralling rents, welfare cuts and lack of social housing
• In the South East (excl London), there are 29, 599 homeless people, with 1119 sleeping rough. The rest are in some type of temporary accommodation

Teamwork is dreamwork

Nisha, Gauri, Brendar and Jean worked alongside Nishkam SWAT on serving drinks

Whilst the rest of us paired up, donned our gloves, picked up our litter sticks and bin bags and headed into Town to collect as much rubbish as we could

Keira, Meera and Darren stayed in the SWAT van (imagine A-TEAM van…it was the bees knees!) and handed out donated clothes to those who needed them

Such a slick operation. Slough Town Centre was transformed in the space of minutes by an influx of volunteers from Goodgym, Nishkam SWAT and Slough Outreach. All there for one purpose and one purpose only – to do something good for others

We were all truly humbled to help out this evening. The energy and vibe was awesome. One task that we would love to help out again on!

Next week we will be doing our first task with Ditton Academy with some gardening work. It will be a longer run distance of 5km each way, so will be looking to leave base location by 18.35 https://www.goodgym.org/happenings/cabbage-patched-kids

Have a great week and see you next Monday