It was our pleasure to drop in on our group run this week to help the new student foodbank at Kingsgate Church, which is sadly needed to tackle student food poverty in Kingston.

A running and walking group made their way there to help volunteers Sarah and Alison tidy up and help with a stocktake, getting the shelves ready for more donations arriving this week. We discovered quite a few Goodgymers (Julie, Dave and Jade!) had experience of auditing and felt quite at home with a spreadsheet - bit of a change from our usual manual handling tasks!

It was great to welcome Luke to the group, who joined Claire, Jas, Jade, Rachel and Petra sorting out the shelves. Ellie and Emma armed themselves with cloths and cleaning products to wipe down the fridges and freezers.

Even though it has only been open a couple of months the weekly food pantry has been overwhelmingly popular, providing students with food, personal hygiene and cleaning items as well as access to optional pastoral support and signposting to additional services available.

We have said we’ll come back when they need some extra hands to do another blitz. Luckily not as cold this week as we ran back along the river to the Quaker Centre and did our cool-down!