Tonight, three GoodGymmers turned up to help encourage donations for FareShare at King's Cross' Tesco Metro.

Our encouragement manifested in a number of forms.

Fundamentally, we were handing out FareShare 'shopping lists' with suggested donations. Customers could then buy items from this list to leave at the in-store food collection at the end of their shop. The food is taken to the closest of FareShare's 21 Regional Centres, where volunteers sort it for redistribution to over 3500 charities across the country. Tesco also estimate a value of the bought food, and make a monetary donation of about 20% on top of this.

Over the course of two hours, we trialled out a variety of ways for encouraging donations.

First, we set our festivity levels to 11 by donning topical headwear (Sally turned up with so many hats, we had enough to offer a choice of hats to a volunteer collecting for another charity). I was also wearing my TFL-themed Christmas jumper to amp up the goodwill (I mean, we were right next to King's Cross, so that's got to translate), while Sally and Beth wore the official bright red tabards.

Second, we set ourselves up in kind of a pincer arrangement: shoppers may not hear the first of us, nor the second of us, but the third round of "food bank" must have really pierced some headphones 👍🏻

Third, Sally cracked onto the great idea of operating a standard phrase in stereo. And so, to the tune of "the foot bone's connected to the leg bone", the three of us sang relevant parts of the phrase "Would you like to...", "buy something for the...", "foodbank". This was surprisingly effective when we could do it without laughing mid-note (I suspect the jazz hands that accompanied "foodbank" helped. Everyone loves jazz hands).

Fourth, we used Beth's pink hair to attract attention. Every time another pink haired person walked in, they nodded at each other the way that kind-(of)-red spirits do 👍🏻

Probably because of this four-pronged approach, we managed to encourage a large number of people to donate. There are definitely a few people whose donations are going to stick with us long after tonight (here's a particular shout out to the conchiglie lady, who said that donating that pasta had "made [her] feel better about herself than [she'd] felt in a long time").

After two hours, donations completely filled the crates we had available and it was time to leave. Feeling inspired by the kindness of strangers, we finished off by each buying our own donations for FareShare (pretty much wedging them in as we could). None of us could believe that we'd managed to make such a difference, and we're hopeful that lots more volunteers are signed up to shifts over the rest of the weekend 😊

Peek-a-boo! I see food! pic.twitter.com/Slv0oa4BBa

— Liz Mills (@LizMill52596794) November 21, 2019